


Sword Of The Witcher

by IllusiveWritings



Category: Castle
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, F/M, Fantasy, The Witcher AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-22
Updated: 2015-08-24
Packaged: 2018-03-31 18:04:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 40,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3987637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IllusiveWritings/pseuds/IllusiveWritings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Entry for the Summer 2015 Ficathon. Richard Castle is a Witcher, a monster slayer for hire, that occasionally writes books. He's hired by a young woman to look for the monster that killed her mother. A job that seems easy enough becomes a walk through hell and back. Rated M for sex, violence, gore and... everything. Set in The Witcher universe. Low fantasy AU. Very low fantasy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. End Of The Hunt

**Chapter 1 - End Of The Hunt**

Monster slayers, most of the time.

A necessary evil, sometimes.

Freaks of nature, at worst.

Witchers were rarely called by their names.

A profession that required intense training, extreme sacrifices and gave little to no satisfaction should be heeded as noble and respectable, in an ideal world. But reality was much harsher than some utopian dream born out of desperation.

In a world where magic created rifts between worlds and caused all types of monsters and spirits to cross the lines between different dimensions and take residence in their lands, Witchers were necessary.

Highly trained swords for hire, they succeeded where even the most skilled soldier was doomed to fail. Taken in as children, they spent a lifetime undergoing physical conditioning and alchemical processes, building resistance to poisons and diseases and the assumptions of mutagenic agents rendered them killing machines. Through the years, their skills with the blades was nurtured day by day and their agility and cunning became unmatched, even the greatest acrobat couldn't be as fast as they were with their blades.

Magic was taught to them. Nothing in comparison to what magicians and sorceresses could achieve, but they knew the basics. The Signs, the most fundamental form of magic, allowed them to get the higher ground during their fights with monsters sometimes three times bigger than them. They needed all the advantages they could.

They made a living by travelling all around the world and looking for monsters to slay or ghosts to eradicate. A bit sellsword, a bit priest, a bit ruthless warrior, Witchers were respected, but most of the time they were feared. People were terrorized, as most of the commoners felt they were closer to the monsters they hunted than human, because of the tremendously horrific process they underwent to become what they were.

Having a Witcher in town often meant that something was very wrong. Everyone was in danger if they needed a Witcher to do something. Ghosts and spirits were just as dangerous as a Nekker or an Endrega, as they could possess people and force them to do the unspeakable.

Therefore, most of the time, Witchers were just vagabonds trying to make ends meet and find a roof for the night. Usually, as soon as their job was done, they were shoved away on the road again. If they were allowed to stay, they rarely had people around them. Respectable townsfolk tended not to meddle in Witcher's affairs until a Drowner appeared in the their yard, crawling out of the river to seek fresh blood to feed on.

Hypocrites.

Richard Castle, of the School Of The Wolf, couldn't help but snicker at the thought as he walked down a path invaded by weed. At least he was far away from water, so no archespores could pop up and shoot him with their toxins.

The mayor of the village that had hired him had shoved a bag of coins at him while he was drinking a pint of ale in the tavern and pushed him out of the village borders, basically ordering him to track down a succubus that was haunting an abandoned manor deep in the forest.

Six days before.

If only the fat idiot had pointed out in which direction he had to go… He was starting to wonder if the man had just paid him to get out of his town so people wouldn't become scared and paranoid when they saw him in their tavern.

Damn the glowing eyes and the white hair that made Witchers so easily recognizable.

The sun was quickly setting behind him as he walked eastward in one last attempt to find this manor. He had been walking in circles for the past few days and he was getting restless to find this place and get it rid of its unwanted visitor. After all he had been paid a decent sum of money; there was no reason to deny the man a job well done. He had also promised another wealthy sum of money if he returned with proof he had slain the succubus.

He had almost lost all his hope when the wolf head medallion hanging from his neck vibrated. A barely there movement, but he felt it strong against his sweaty skin. Something not of that world was around.

He flexed his fingers, already itching for his silver blade, when he suddenly stepped into a large clearing. In front of him, in the shades projected by the thick fronds of the oaks around him, the famous haunted manor he had been instructed to liberate.

Problem was: it wasn't abandoned. It was a fully illuminated, richly decorated manor full of life and people bustling in the last lights of the early spring day. It looked pretty normal to him, but his medallion still vibrated, so he decided to investigate further.

There was something fishy in that situation, that was sure. And it wasn't the basket of freshly gutted herrings that a maid was carrying as she walked up the neat track that went up to the back of the house from a larger road that went straight into the woods, on the other side of the clearing. He had arrived from the wrong side apparently.

Slowly, not to startle anyone as the hurried to finish their daily chores, he moved up towards the house. Though he was sure that, after six days spent in the thick of the forest, he was a ghastly sight to behold at such a late hour, the first person that noticed him greeted him with a broad smile.

He was probably shortsighted, thought Castle.

"Greetings traveler. May I help you?"

The man, a short, stubby farmer, holding a large sheaf of hay in his hands as he loaded it on a carriage, looked incredibly friendly for someone who was talking to a Witcher.

"Yes… ah… I'm sorry, I think I'm lost. You see I'm…"

"A stranded traveler, of course… come my friend. The Lady of the House will be pleased to have such an honorable guest for the night."

With a large hand on his shoulder, careful not to touch the sheaths of his swords, the farmer led Castle to the back door. The man was friendly, too friendly. Something was wrong indeed, but he still had no idea what it was. He decided to play along and see where the events led him. He was pretty sure he was in the right place; he just had to understand what was going on.

When he stepped in the kitchen, he was nearly knocked down by the wonderful scents hanging in the air, from the freshly picked herbs hanged to dry near the fireplace to the thick stew that was being cooked in a deep kettle on the nearby stove. And baked potatoes. Castle found himself salivating as the kitchen personnel, young women all feverishly working, politely greeted him.

He heard one giggle as she realized that she had just met a Witcher. He sighed. People like him, as rare as they were, were famous not only because they were excellent monster slayers, but also for their prowess in bed. The alchemical and mutagenic process they went through made them sterile, so they were the perfect partner for those women, and sometimes men, that wanted to have some fun without facing consequences. Also, being basically immune to common diseases and extremely resistant to poisons and toxins, being… not so appropriate with a Witcher had no chances of leading to infectious diseases or anything like that. Giggles from young women were common when a Witcher was around.

As much as angry fathers and husband preemptively shutting daughters and wives away.

The farmer greeted a maiden and left him in her hands, then went away back to his work.

"Come with me sir," she said, leading him deeper in the house. "Our Lady always welcomes stranded travelers like you. I'll give you something to get yourself presentable for dinner."

"How kind of your Lady…" he replied, looking around. The house was opulent, but not tacky. There was a display of wealth, with rich tapestry and antique furniture, but nothing too extreme. The owners had good taste, and the servants kept everything clean and neat.

And yet, they were too friendly. Most of the people didn't like to have Witchers around, and yet they had welcomed and offered him a lush room, supplies to get cleaned up, and apparently dinner with the mistress of the house. It seemed like they didn't even know what a Witcher was.

Now not only the continuous vibration of his medallion kept him alert, but also his instincts. There was something very, very wrong in this place.

Maybe he hadn't wasted those six days wandering for a scared man's whim. It might not be a succubus, as they tended to live alone in more secluded places than this, but there was something otherworldly in this manor.

"Yes, she is a kind woman. Treats us right. Come please."

The maid led him upstairs to what looked like a guest chamber. "You can rest here. I'll bring towels, water and soap so you can clean yourself. Do you have a clean shirt?"

Castle nodded and took the small backpack off his shoulders. "I have clean clothes, though I wouldn't mind if someone could at least wash this shirt for me."

The girl nodded. "It will be done. I'll be back shortly."

The moment she closed the door behind her, Castle went into hound mode. He dropped both the backpack and the swords to the floor and, taking a silver-lined dagger from his boot before he started looking around, this time not admiring the tapestries or the engraved four poster bed. He was searching for traces of anything abnormal.

He found plenty just with a quick look around.

The maids were thorough when they cleaned, but bloodstains were tough to wash away. And there was a nice smudge just beside the bedside table. And traces of someone bleeding being dragged towards the door were still pretty fresh.

This wasn't the work of a succubus. Succubae sucked the energy of their victims while they had sex, and usually left them tired, sated, in love with a hellish creature for a while, but alive. There was never blood involved. And here there was a lot of blood.

Vampire. There was a vampire involved here.

Or worse…

The perspective didn't exactly look great, he had to admit it.

"Fuck…" he murmured, sheathing his dagger when he heard the maid approaching the door. When she opened the door, balancing a small pile of towels on an arm and holding a steaming jug, he was casually looking out of the window. There was still activity down in the courtyard, though the sun had already set and the little light came only from torches and the windows. In the yellow glow, he could see the kind farmer still loading hay on his carriage.

Weird didn't even start describing the whole situation.

The young girl left the supplies on a table near the door. "Dinner will be served in the main dining hall in an hour. Lady Kandell is eager to meet you, sir. If you need anything, don't refrain from pulling that rope and an alarm will ring downstairs. I'll be happy to procure anything you'll ask. Leave the dirty clothes on this chair, I'll take care they're washed and hung out to dry during dinner."

With that she left him alone once again.

"Well, if the Lady wants to dine with me…" he mumbled, unbuckling the strap that held the sheaths of his swords on his back to lay them beside the bed. If he had to have dinner with a noblewoman, he'd better be presentable. Also, he wasn't one to forgo the possibility of getting the grime off himself, and have his clothes washed and ironed, for once.

He used the bar of soap and the hot water wash away most of the dirt of six days spent roaming in a thick oak forest, pieces of grass and foliage too. On a richly engraved dresser nearby rested a set of toiletries. He used the comb to attempt at taming his unruly hair. As he tried to comb through the thick white locks, he decided he definitely needed a haircut. In the past few months his hair had grown past his shoulders, and keeping them clean and in order had become impossible, considering the roaming life he lived. As he looked at his reflection in the full figure mirror, while buttoning his crispy white shirt, he decided he'd get an haircut the same moment he'd set foot in Vizima.

Once he thought he was presentable enough, he tucked the silver-bladed dagger in his boot. He couldn't go down to dinner with his swords, but the dagger could easily be hidden. If there was a vampire involved in all those strange happenings, he would never go anywhere unarmed.

Someone knocked on the door. When Castle opened it, he found a tall and pale butler waiting for him. The man silently guided him to the dining hall; it was a lushly furnished room with a long rectangular table already prepared, thick red brocade tapestry on the walls. A large fireplace and an insane amount of beeswax candles gave the room a dark orange hue that made it almost hard to see. He was lucky the mutagenic agents he had consumed in his youth for the Trial Of The Grasses, one of the steps to become a Witcher, had made it possible for him to see even with such an unfavorable light.

The suspect that there was a vampire involved was becoming more and more a certainty each time he looked around and noticed little details. Lack of light was one of those details.

He was admiring a portrait of a knight in full gear when the door behind him opened. A tall, slender woman dressed in the most revealing kind of dress he had ever seen, outside of a brothel, showing off an impressive cleavage. The skirt had a slit from ankle to hip that left nothing to imagination. As he respectfully bowed in front of the noblewoman, he couldn't help but think about how beautiful that woman was.

"My Lady…" he greeted her, politely.

"Good evening sir. My servants informed me I was having a guest tonight. They've told me they found you stranded in the forest." Her voice was sensual and mellow, like raw honey flowing directly from the honeycomb. Her bright blue eyes glinted in the dim light and the smile she put on, probably for appearances, shined like an autonomous source of light.

Feigning meekness as well as he could, he smiled. "Yes I… was heading to Vizima but I'm not familiar with the area and I got lost. I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere and ended up walking in circles in the forest. Your attendees were so kind to give me a place, some water and soap to get rid of weeks on the road. I'll forever be thankful for that."

A valet entered and silently pulled the chair at the head of the table for his lady so she could sit, and when she was comfortably seated, he did the same for Castle. The same moment he had set his ass on the wooden surface, a small contingent of waiters and kitchen aids stormed in and brought shiny platters and bowls with the food.

It had been ages since he'd had such a luxurious banquet, that he had to admit.

They ate while chatting inconsequentially. Castle kept up the appearances and went on playing the part of the stranded lonely traveler that had stumbled upon the isolated house in the woods. The woman, Lady Beth Kandell, was apparently a widow of a small noble of Kaedwen that had decided to move in Temeria some years ago to live in peace. Little did they know about his weak heart that would leave her mourning her husband less than ten years after they had moved.

Castle shook his head, inwardly smiling.  _The old trick of the deceased husband._  He had noticed she had barely ate a bite or two of the four courses of the meal and that her pupils weren't round, but straight, like the eyes of a cat.

Little light, straight pupils, ate nothing… vampire.

After dinner, the woman guided him to a parlor. She had him sit on a plush couch and poured him a glass of vodka, before sitting down herself on an armchair in front of him.

"So… tell me sir, what brings you to these parts of the kingdom?"

He shrugged his shoulders. "This and that. I'm a writer," and to an extent, that was true. "And I love to see the world. I usually travel around the world, looking for things to write about."

"And what do you write about, Sir Castle?"

"Novels, mostly. I've tried my hand in poetry, but I'll leave bards to that. I'm more interested in the mystery."

And for the first time that evening, he hadn't needed to lie. He did write in his spare time, and published under a pseudonym, with a more than decent success.

"Oh there's enough mystery to inspire you around here that's sure. I was told you were heavily armed when you arrived."

"Travelling alone, you never know what you may encounter on the roads. The world's a dangerous place."

She nodded. "Oh yes indeed. But tell me… why a Witcher would try to pass himself as a stranded traveler? Did the mayor of the village send you?"

Castle chuckled. "I see it's not possible to fool you any longer," he said, downing the remaining vodka in one quick swallow. "How long have you known?"

"Long enough. But, spill it. Did the major sent you?" she asked again.

He nodded. But he was convinced you were a succubus. And from what I gathered, I highly doubt you are."

"What do you think I am then?"

Faking an easiness that was quickly fading away, Castle crossed his legs, so that the dagger hidden in the boot was easy to reach. "Considering the amount of blood splatters your servants have tried to clean around the house, I'm quite sure you're a vampire."

"Uhm…" she nodded. "Impressive. And you gathered that only from the poorly cleaned traces of blood?"

"And the little light in the dining hall, the fact that you barely ate anything at dinner and your eyes are kind of revealing."

"Eh, I had forgotten how perceptive Witchers are. What do you intend to do?"

"First of all I would like to know if what the major said is true. He said people have been disappearing. Mostly young men, that's why he thought a succubus had taken residence here. What do you have to say about them?"

She smiled.

Fuck.

It was that kind of wicked smile that kind of monsters usually gave before they pounced at attacked.

Castle braced himself, just in case.

"They were delicious."

He was right. She pounced.

A split second after she had spoken, they were tumbling on the floor crashing furniture and destroying that adorable cabinet where she kept the liquor, spilling them all over them. Her fangs bared as she tried to bite his neck, saliva dribbling down the pointy teeth as she anticipated a succulent meal of fresh blood. He managed to shove his left forearm in her mouth to keep her from making more damage by biting more vital parts of his body.

He had made a major mistake. She wasn't a simple, common, relatively innocuous vampire. She was a Bruxa, a higher vampire, a stronger form of the same monster, more subtle as they were able to charm people to meddle with them, and definitely more dangerous. Damn he had underestimated her and was stupid enough to forget to cast the Quen Sign, that created a protective shield around him. There was nothing except the light fabric of his shirt to protect his arm from her sharp fangs.

He grimaced in pain as the monster sunk her teeth in his flesh, sucking hard as blood poured. But she couldn't expect that his blood had a revolting taste, because of all the mutagens he had been given in the past, making him a terrible meal for a monster like her. She snapped her jaws open and leaned back, hissing. His blood dripped on his face from her teeth, along with her nauseating saliva.

"You…" she cackled. "You won't leave this place alive!"

"Are you sure about that?"

She tried to bite him again and again met the muscles of his arm. While keeping her busy with that, he bent his right leg just enough so he could grab the hilt of the dagger from his boot. She was still gnawing away at his flesh when he managed to stab her in the back, three times in rapid succession. The silver blade was highly caustic to monsters like her and she let go of him, with a loud scream of pain. That gave him the chance to hit her in a much more lethal spot: he pushed the sharp blade in her ear. The silver burned her, searing her flesh and brain to a pulp. The Bruxa convulsed above him, eyes bawling as she gnawed at the air trying to set herself free from his deadly stab. He grasped her neck with his other hand, holding her in place as he pushed her back until she was lying on the floor.

He groaned as the bite marks on his arm stung and hurt, blood dripping down to his hand and making his hold on her clammy skin slippery. He doubled his effort, to keep holding her down and the dagger in her head. The exertion was making him breathless, but finally, after endless minutes of fighting to maintain control, the Bruxa stopped jerking beneath him.

Taking a deep breath, he pulled the dagger out. A gush of dark red blood and gray matter flushed out of the wound and onto the carpet, ruining it forever. The smell was disgusting, enough to make him want to puke.

Standing up, he pulled the head of the dead Bruxa so she would lie prone on the floor. He passed the silver blade on her neck. The sharp metal cut easily into the now lax flesh and cut the head off the body. That was the proof he had slain the entity that haunted the manor, to bring back to the village in order to claim the rest of the money of the contract.

He still held the head of the Bruxa by the hair and the bloodied dagger in the other hand when some valets entered. They looked at him, eyes bawling and mouth gaping in shock as they saw the guest they had welcomed and fed holding the head of their Lady, decapitated. Blood was still spurting from his own arm and dripping from the severed head and neck, and he looked positively gruesome, covered in gore.

Shrugging, he walked out of the room. "She was a Bruxa." The proceeded to show them the sharp, inhuman teeth and the straight pupils.

"But…" stammered one of the valets. "How… You're a Witcher?"

Castle nodded. "I see the spell she put on you has already vanished. Yes, I'm a Witcher and this Bruxa had enchanted all of you to believe she was your Lady. She probably killed her years ago," he explained.

"How did you…"

He shook his head. "It's my job, no more no less. And apparently you were not so good at washing the blood away from furniture and floors. Now… would you mind washing this shirt?" he asked. "I need to get to Vizima as soon as I can and I don't think walking all the way there from here covered in blood would be a good idea." He omitted the part where he'd tell them that so much blood would probably attract all the monsters in the area, but advised them to burn the body in order to avoid necrophagers, monsters that fed on dead and rotting bodies, common in badly maintained graveyards and battlefields, in the courtyard.

The servants started working again around him. They took the head of the monster and promptly put it in a burlap sack, and then someone grabbed the dagger and took down to the smithy to be cleaned and sharpened. A maid took the soiled shirt and went to wash it. A stubby elder woman dragged him in the kitchen to tend to his arm.

In a flurry of soap, hot water and healing herbs, the bite marks were disinfected and bandaged, his shirt cleaned and mended and his boots shined. One of the shepards, an amateour but capable barber that took care of the workers also cut his hair for free when he lamented how long and unruly it had become. The next morning, after a good night of sleep, he was ready to walk back to the village to cash in the rest of the payment, with a detailed map this time, gently offered by another grateful farmer.

When he appeared at the village gate, that late afternoon, holding the severed head of the monster as proof of his accomplished mission, the people were gasping in disbelief and fear. People shoved children and women inside, murmured insults and blasphemies at him, cursing his presence and the bad luck it brought. He called the major, loudly, standing in the middle of the town square showing off the head and demanding to speak to him.

The fat man hurried out of his house, scared to death. When he saw the head of the Bruxa he stopped in his tracks. "Oh my God you did it!"

"Of course I did it, you bloody idiot!" he yelled in response. "And it would have taken a lot less if you had told me in which direction to go!" he threw the head at his feet. "And it was a Bruxa, not a Succubus. Succubae leave their victim tired but alive. This one sucked them dry. Way more dangerous. Now… I was promised a decent sum of money if I dealt with what haunted that mansion, right? Time to give it up!"

The man nodded and went back inside to gather the coin. He threw him a small leather pouch from the doorstep.

Castle weighted the pouch in his hand. At least one hundred Orens, plus the two hundred he had already received… he was good for a while.

"Thank you. Now… can any of you show me the direction for Vizima or all of you bloody morons don't even know where the capital is?"

A young farmer approached him and drew the quickest route to the capital of the reign on his map, giving him some landmarks so he could orientate himself. Castle thanked him, giving him a couple of coins for the trouble and went on the road. He didn't want to spend a single moment more in that place.

He was tired of the attitude of people towards Witchers. It wasn't like they were heartless bastards. They weren't much different from them. They were just unlucky enough to be the only people trained to kill the monsters that plagued their lands.

And that scared those who were not smart enough to understand that without them, the humans, elves and dwarves alike would be constantly chased by drowners, demons and ghouls.

But apparently, a white haired man that knew how to wield a sword was scarier than a fucking Nekker.


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2 - How To Deal With Idiots, Witcher Style**

Eight excruciating days later, Castle arrived in Vizima.

The high walls of the capital of the kingdom of Temeria were a sight for sore eyes. He had been on the road for so long, he was really looking forward to retrieve his royalties payment from his editor for his latest book, rent a room at the inn in the low quarter and soak in some commodities after months of enduring in the wilderness of southern Temeria, chasing monsters and sleeping on the beer soaked benches of some tavern along the road. When he was lucky.

He had spent the last night in a lice infested barn with a barghest, also known as a hell hound, that seemed intentioned to bark all night, to the point that, exhausted and furious, he had just burst out of the door, his silver sword in his hand, with only his trousers on and faced the critter. The hungry beast, surrounded by a green, fetid mist, barked and snarled at him, already tasting the fresh blood it'd draw from his chosen prey, but. If only the mangy dog hadn't picked the wrong guy.

Castle waved his hand, marking a Sign and an evanescent purple circle appeared on the ground a few steps away from him. Then he waited.

The beast bared his teeth, acid spit dripping from the sharp yellowed fangs, and pounced. But just as it felt like it had won the fight before it had even begun, it found itself trapped in a magical device that blocked it. Castle didn't waste any time, with a flick of his wrist, the silver blade cut through the barghest's neck, beheading it. The hideous head rolled a few feet away from the lifeless body, the green mist dissolved and the stench of sulfur disappeared.

Finally, the only sound that broke the quiet of the cool early spring night was the light breeze blowing southward, bringing in the scents of blooming flowers and cedar wood.

Satisfied with the result, he threw the dead body away from the barn, behind a bush and went back in the barn. He dropped on a bale of hay, grabbed a blanket he always kept in his backpack and settled down, finally able to rest.

After that, he had slept like a baby.

Yet, even after he had rested almost all night long, he was tired. It was the kind of weariness that piled up with time, more mental than physical. Strange things were happening; more monsters were popping up everywhere… He didn't have a moment to rest; he had been on the move for months, nearly a year, traveling up and down following leads and slaying monster after monster.

Witchers were few and scattered around the northern kingdoms, and monsters were many and often clumped up in a small area. Often it happened that a single Witcher found him or herself moving from village to village without a moment of break, often not even a full night of rest.

It had taken him eight days to reach the city, when it was usually a three days long journey, because willing or not villagers had things for him to do. Monsters to slay, curses to lift. People to look for. Drowners, atrocious creatures that rose from the waters of lakes and rivers where the bodies of hanged criminals were thrown, were threatening the village every night, and farmers, who often got out in the fields before dawn, were scared of them, to the point that the work in the work in the fields was slowed down by that scum. They offered him a hefty sum of money to deal with the problem, and it had taken him tour long days and nights spent stalking the banks of the river to get them all.

He needed a drink.

When he finally walked through the high door of the city walls, he relaxed a little bit. Blending in was easier in big cities, while in small villages he tended to stand up out more, given the two swords on his back, the white hair and the glowing eyes. All signs that made Witchers extremely recognizable in small crowds, but in bigger ones? There were more weirdoes to look at, than a heavily white-haired guy that kept to himself.

Vizima was crowded as usual. The gravel crunched beneath his heavy boots as he walked up the hill where the Trade Quarter was, as he wanted to get to the publisher's office before sundown. He didn't like it much, but the company was big and that way his novels could spread through the whole continent, as it was translated and printed even for Nilfgaard, but the main office was there in Vizima, so once a year he had to travel up there, no matter where he was or what he wanted to do, to gather the royalties.

And he was lucky to have them. Most of his colleagues had to survive with what they were paid by taking contracts, and often it wasn't much. More famous Witchers were usually paid more, and he was lucky he was fairly known, but those who started out were often paid only with a bowl of soup and a place to sleep. It wasn't much. He had amassed a decent wealth, in banks here and there and in Kaer Morhen too, as insurance. It allowed him to stop in big cities and temples around the world to study or write, instead of continuously chasing contracts after contracts, like he had done in the past, when he had just passed the last Trial and had been officially declared a Witcher.

The market was busy as usual, merchants hollering trying to gather more clients to their stalls before they had to close and return the next day, and the last minute customers filled the big market square. Thirsty, Castle deviated a little and found a food and drink stall, owned by an elderly lady with bright green eyes and a face that was once beautiful, but was now marked by the years spent operating a stall come hell or high water, and bought chicken sandwich and a tankard of stout beer, just to replenish some of his energyies.

Hard to believe, but it was the first meal he had to chew in more than a week, after the dinner with the Bruxa. Most of the food he had eaten after that, between lifting a curse and chasing a Drowner down a muddy river bank, was usually a tasteless mush that looked more like wet cement with a faint taste of who knows what vegetable. Not nearly enough to fill him up after he spent night and day working.

But at least there was money to deposit in the bank. And if he was lucky, some time to spend away from monsters, checking any possible new publication about them. Vesemir, his instructor back at Kaer Morhen, the fortress where he had grown up, always taught that knowledge was as valuable as the silver sword, for a Witcher, and a good one never let the opportunity to learn more about monsters pass.

And Castle had learned that often, the difference between a good Witcher and a dead one, was indeed knowledge. He hadn't remained alive for nearly a century only because he was a good swordsman, after all.

He downed the last of the beer and handed the tankard back, then headed to the publisher house, just down the road from the square. He wasn't exactly happy to meet his publisher, but it was a necessary evil.

She was a necessary evil, unfortunately.

The company was housed in a three floor building, renovated recently to match more modern aesthetic canons. Every window was adorned with potted plants and flowers that added a touch of color more and helped keep in check the revolting smells that sometimes came up from the sewers and the poor quarters, downhill. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not, but it was a nice touch nevertheless.

He knocked, and a dwarf doorman opened the door. "Good evenin' sir," he said, his voice thick and deep, with a marked accent. "How can I help ye?"

"I'm here to see Gina Cowell. She should be expecting me."

"Ah… the Witcher!" he exclaimed as he opened the door and let him in. "And she's Griffin now."

Castle chuckled. "Married again?"

"Nay, dropped the name of her dead husband." He stumbled a bit on his short legs as he climbed on his stool behind his desk. He opened a thick book to a marked page and turned it towards him, offering him a pen and inkwell. "A signature please."

Having dealt with the bureaucracy, he was allowed in. "She still has the same office upstairs?"

"Aye, still first room on the left, first floor. Good evenin'."

We walked up and knocked on the door. Gina's calm voice invited him in instantly.

As he moved inside the office, the blonde editor- in- chief of the company lifted her eyes from what looked like a manuscript and smiled. "Ah, my favourite monster slayer comes back at last. You should have been here a month ago."

He dropped the backpack and the sword scabbards on the floor and sat on a chair in front of the desk. "Work kept me on the road a while longer."

"Why don't you just drop it, settle down here and write more books?" she said. "I bet there are thousands of Witchers out there."

He snorted. "Actually, after my brother died, it's basically me, Lambert, Eskel and Vesemir. I have no idea if Ciri has undergone the mutations and other schools are reduced to three or four members themselves too. No, I can't settle down." He rubbed the bridge of his nose, feeling the ragged edges of a fairly recent scar beneath his calloused fingertips. "There's unrest in the world, monsters are popping up like daisies in Spring. And I don't really think that Radovid's army can take care of all the monsters that are killing his people in his kingdom."

"You caome from Redania? That's a long journey."

"Now you see why it took me so long to arrive here? My horse got killed halfway here and I had to walk." He then took the backpack and rummaged a little in it. He pulled a leather-bound ledger from it. "But it gave me more time to finish this and revision revise it, first page to last."

Gina took the ledger and opened it carefully, quickly reading through the first few pages. She looked happy with what he had written. "Oh good. Less work for me then. If it's not took messed up, we can have it published by next month. The crowds are agonizing for your next book."

"I doubt it. I'm pretty convinced the crowds want food that's not rotten and water that's not full of cholera bacteria, but I'll take your word for what it is. So, my money?"

She pulled a large leather sack from a drawer. "Here it is. Five thousand orens, around one thousand three hundred Novigrad crowns."

He nodded. "Good. I'll get them deposited in Vivaldi's bank as soon as I'm out of here."

"Eh, Golan doesn't own the bank anymore. He's been taken over after Foltest decided to cut the concessions to the nonhumans."

"Oh right, exactly what Temeria needed. The king is a fool."

"Might be, but he's still the king. Go, if you want to deposit the money before tonight."

He stood. "Thanks Gina. If I'm alive I'll be back for royalties next year around this time."

"Oh don't be so pessimistic Richard. We've been dealing with you for nearly five decades now and you've always come back for your money." Gina put the ledger down and stood, extending her hand. "If you don't come I assume all the royalties will go to Kaer Morhen, as per previous agreements."

They shook hands. "Yes, as usual. I'll be in the city for a while, maybe a month, studying. Maybe I'll take care of some contracts nearby. Know of any possible work for a Witcher in Vizima?"

"There's always work for a Witcher in Vizima. Our sewers are packed with whatever lives down there. Sometimes you can hear them hiss and splash around in the water. Just ask to the alderman."

"As usual, Drowners. I spent three days trying to kill as many as I can, there's an infestation around here," he mused. "Alright. You know where to find me, in case you need anything about the book."

"Of course Richard. Do you have a title?"

He nodded. "Yes. Storm Fall."

With that, he turned and walked out of the study. He didn't have the heart to tell her that he had killed the main character after so many years.

He was pretty sure he'd hear her scream all the way from the Royal library the next day.

He greeted the doorman and walked out of the building. The sun had nearly set and the few people still walking around where hurrying up home in order to get supper ready, or get ready for some ball or banquet in some noble's villa. The Trade and Upper quarter were often frequented by the nobles and well-to-do of the city, and he observed some of them, ready and set to appear to the Royal court, were heading there in carriages or by horse. That meant he had little time to go to the bank, he had to get rid of all that money or he'd be an easy prey for muggers. Not that muggers worried him, but they were a nuisance.

As Gina had said, the bank was not in the capable hands of Golan Vivaldi, the bald, thick bearded dwarvesfs that handled everyone's money and kept some of the best secrets of Temeria. Instead of his employees, countless humans jittery walked around carrying bags of money and receipts written in brown parchment. No sign of nonhumans.

He sighed. Temeria already had issues with racial disputes and riots caused by racism, the Scoia'tel, the illegal front of liberation of nonhumans gathered more supporters every day, and taking the bank from Vivaldi was a bad idea. It only added fuel to a fire that was already burning brightly in all the Northern Kingdoms. Foltest was an idiot.

His turn came and he threw the sack and the official receipt signed by Gina and her boss with the total amount of money contained in the sack written on in front of a puny, young bank teller. Then he pulled his bank statement, the booklet where all his banking information were stored and asked for the money to be added to his bank account. The booklet allowed him to withdraw or deposit his money in every bank of Temeria, Redania and Kaedwen.

The teller saw all the signs that pointed he was a Witcher and started shaking. He took the booklet, checked his information on a big book behind the counter and nodded. "Yes Mister Castle. I'll add the money right away." He took a pen from an inkwell and wrote the deposit on the registry and his booklet. "I'll have to take two hundred crowns as taxes though…"

Bored to death up to that moment, Castle felt the flare of anger spark in his chest. "Excuse me? It was only ten crowns last year!"

"King Foltest added more taxes for nonhumans sir."

Castle growled. "Do I look like a nonhuman to you?"

The teller, clearly scared to death by his glowing, catlike eyes and the rage showing in them, started shaking even harder. "It… the laws categorizes even Witchers as nonhumans, I'm sorry sir, I can't do much about it."

"Yes, of course you can do something," said Castle, waving his hand behind the counter to form the Axii Sign, the Sign that allowed him to influence people's mind. "You can take only fifty, like last year."

Confused, the teller stopped shaking and nodded. "Yes sir. As you wish sir." He sanded the fresh ink to let it dry and gave it back to him. "Thank you for choosing the New Temerian Bank and goodnight."

Castle took the booklet and stormed out of the bank.

Now he definitely needed that drink.

* * *

He found that drink in the form of a dusty bottle of cheap vodka at the cheapest tavern of the town, in the Temple quarter, the place where the poor lived. Far away from the standards of the rich people, that inn was the best place for a person like him to hide and mingle with the customers. It was the kind of place frequented by people who had little to spend, where food and drink where cheap and lacked quality and taste, but portions were abundant and the owner didn't mind if you had white hair and two swords on your back, as long as you paid.

And Castle always paid.

Close to the garrison, the tavern was packed with off-duty guards, Captain included. They played cards and dice at a table beside the corner where he sat, downing tankards of red beer as if it was water - it probably was - and merrily laughing about their good or bad luck. They took turns, as two at a time they left the table and went out to the brothel right across the street, to have fun with a girl or two, then returned to play.

Castle sat in silence, a brand new ledger in front of him, trying to write down a few ideas for the new book and a new character, yet thoughts refused to flow. He was too concentrated on the various displays of humanity, and nonhumanity, in front of him. In that smoky tavern that reeked of piss, stale spilled ale, rotten hay and sweat, he found something extremely interesting.

A woman.

A guard, apparently, given the white and red gambeson she wore with the Temerian Lilies sewn on it. But she didn't look like the kind of woman that dwelled in the slums of Vizima, she clearly wasn't a prostitute and now way in hell or heaven she was a sorceress. No, definitely not. She was… normal. The kind of girl you'd find at the Inn in the upper quarters, or at court. She had the look, the stance and the aspect of a woman, teeth included. He'd seen her smile enough to know that there weren't holes in her teeth.

She sat with two men and another woman at a small round table across the inn from his position, eating a plate of grilled lamb ribs and mashed potatoes with a tankard of Vizima's Champion, a regional variant of red ale, in front of her, quite a rich and costly dinner considering the place. Her companions were all eating and drinking the same, so it meant they had money to spend. They had probably decided to stop by the Hairy Bear only because it was close to the guardhouse.

Yet, how come a woman like that enrolled in the city guards? Women were usually forbidden from such jobs, they usually became merchants or whatever kept them away from swords and dangers…

She intrigued him.

She looked happy, as she ate and drank the evening away, and he found himself trying to figure out the reason she had joined the guards.

The only theory that made sense was the fact that she had probably lost someone dear and wanted to catch the killer. Happened often, unfortunately. She probably was from an influential family, and that allowed her to enter the guards.

Everything else was nothing but castles in the air.

Suddenly, he started writing. Fast as a hare escaping from a fox, he dipped the pen in his inkwell and words started flowing on the thick, cheap paper. The story of an orphaned noblewoman that craved justice for… her mother, and enrolled in the city guards of… Novigrad. No need to pinpoint her where she lived, probably endangering her privacy. Setting the new novel on the other side of the continent would surely deflect suspects that the story was based on a certain person in Vizima.

A certain woman with long wavy chestnut hair, deep green eyes that changed to the color of honey with the dim candlelight and a smile that could turn the most stone hearted criminal into a poodle.

That was until a clearly drunk, massive thug noticed him and let out a loud belch. "We've got a mutant in the house!" he said, pointing a stubby finger at him.

 _Well at least he didn't say freak_ , he thought.

"So what?"

"I don't like mutants!"

Castle chuckled. "And I don't like drunken stinking louts screaming at me, I guess we're even!"

"Get out of here!" he screamed again. "You'll spoil the beer!"

"Those are crones, not Witchers, idiot," he replied, anger flaming again, like in the bank. "How can I even spoil your beer from here? Jerking off and get a bull's eye in your tankard? I'm good but not that good!"

The big drunkard snorted and stood from his bench, nearly trampling his companions doing so. "How dare you? You don't know who you're talking to!" he bellowed.

"I'm talking to a drunken idiot that can't discern a cunt from a dead fish, apparently."

Everyone in the inn laughed at that, even the unknown woman. He had seen her talking to her companions, while observing the scene from afar, and smile about the idiocy of the drunk customer accusing the Witcher to spoil the beer.

At least someone in there was educated enough not to believe in stupid superstitions.

But the witty quip and the subsequent burst of hilarity only enraged the thug more. Hurt and seeking revenge, he strode towards Castle and grabbed the lapel of his white shirt, pulling him to his feet. "Say that again!"

Instead of replying, Castle waved the fingers of his left hand, in such a tiny gesture no one caught it until the Aard Sign came to be effective. A shockwave hit the thug square in his chest, pushing him back against the wall. It was so strong that he was forced to let Castle go.

The Witcher landed on his feet, as if nothing had happened, but in his hand, he already had his steel bastard sword and he was pointing it at the thug's throat. "You're a drunken idiot that can't see the differences between a dead fish and a cunt."

Then he pushed the sharp tip of the blade against his skin, just enough to graze it but not to leave a permanent scar. He wanted to feel it, the cold steel against his neck. A flick of his wrist and his jugular would be cut wide open and blood would start spraying like a fountain, as life left his body.

By the look of pure, unadulterated fear in his eyes, he didn't want to die. He remained silent, gasping as the steel prickled the sensitive skin in his neck. A small, thin drop of blood dripped down the tiny graze and stained the already filthy doublet the guy was wearing.

"You have anything else to say?" asked Castle.

The man shook his head, and the Witcher lowered his sword. "Good. Now go back to your table and keep drinking your beer. I won't spoil it, you won't disturb me or anyone else here and you'll stay calm all night. Clear?"

Not words, but only a nod and the quick execution of his orders were his answer. He sat back at his table and grabbed his tankard, going back to his drink and his friends.

Castle did the same; he went back to his bottle of vodka and his ledger. He wrote a couple pages more, outlining part of the story of the new novel then he found himself with his hand stilled on the page, writing nothing.

He was worn out. He had already rented a room, the key heavy in his pocket. So he gathered his things and headed upstairs. Doing so, he walked by the mysterious woman's table and their gazes locked for a moment. She followed him up the stairs and he felt a sort of magnetic impulse to go down and find an excuse to talk to her.

He resisted it, though, but her eyes were something magical.

He started fearing she was actually a sorceress.


	3. Well That Was Awkward

**Chapter 3 - Well That Was Awkward**

The room was small, drafty and moist, but it had a bed and clean sheets. Yes, he had spent a full night in a gorgeous bed ten days before, but during the subsequent days he worked his ass off and slept in temporary arrangements like barns or on benches in filthy inns, and the prospect of having a real mattress beneath his back that night was more than welcome. He basically collapsed on it the same moment he shut the door of the room.

The next morning, when he woke, he was greeted by an obtrusive ray of light straight in his eyes and the scent of freshly baked oat bread, flavored with honey. His stomach grumbled as he realized he was hungry. He quickly washed himself with the little water the maid had left in a jug by his bed, regretting it wasn't enough to shave, but got dressed and strapped his swords to his back and the dagger to his belt, then went downstairs. He ordered breakfast, ate calmly while writing a bit more then headed to the temple. He spent most of the day in the library of the Temple of Melitele, surrounded by tomes.

Apparently, in the last year many books had been published about monsters, with updated information he definitely needed to know to succeed in his job. New potions formulae had been created, in order to double the effects but reduce the side effects and new blade oils that gave an edge in fighting against certain monsters had been found and there was so much stuff to memorize - or take notes - before he went back on the road. It would take him at least a week to read through them, and he still had to apply to be allowed in the royal library.

He would probably need to stay a little longer, if he found more books. He also wanted to find a couple of contracts in the city, so that would take more time too. Not that he had somewhere to be – he could spend a whole here in Vizima, picking up contracts here and there. It wasn't like there was a lack of monsters in the area, but he liked to travel. It gave him a different perspective on the world and what was going on and to learn something new every day.

When night fell, he walked back to the inn and sat at the same spot as the night before, with a tankard of ale and a bowl of soup. As he read through his notes, he watched the people around him again. That night, there were many new faces he hadn't seen the night before. A small group of elves sat at the table beside him, and one of them was trying to convince the others to go with him as he was planning to leave and join a Scoia'tel band that hid in the caves. Then there were dwarves sitting together and playing dice and gwent, and their accent, so tight and recognizable, made him smile. They inserted expletives, very gross expletives, every three words and they were damn funny people as a whole. Rarely dwarves treated him like scum, quite the contrary, so he enjoyed their company from time to time. Then there was a band of thugs betting on each other in a brawling contest in the far corner of the inn.

Ah, taverns looked all the same all around the world.

Except in Nilfgaard. He hated taverns in Nilfgaard. Down south in the Empire, everything was so perfect and neat and sparkly shiny that it was almost unbearable. Witchers were frown upon, but not discriminated, yet rarely they found work. It wasn't like there was a lack of monsters in Nilfgaard, they just preferred to ignore the problem and they called professionals only when the issue had gone overboard.

It was one of the reasons Witchers rarely dealt with Niflgaardians. Except for his brother. He wandered around the empire a lot, when he was alive.

God knows why he did, but hey… if he liked it that way…

He was in the middle of his second tankard when a group of off duty guards entered the inn. Among the different voices, he caught that of a woman and looked up from his notes. The mysterious woman was back. A regular maybe? She probably came there when she finished her shift to blow off some steam with her friends. The blond blue eyed guy and the muscular hunk were with her again, but the blonde girl that was with them the other night had been replaced by a gorgeous dark skinned woman that evidently came from Zerrikania, the kingdom south of Nilfgaard, given her skin tone.

They all set at the same table and ordered both dinner and drinks, and Castle went back to his notes. Only one day and he had filled half a ledger of new notions and he was trying to go through what he could confirm with his personal experience - he was always a little wary of scholars, as they rarely had first hand experience with monsters - and what was rubbish added just to make it look like it was something new. Vesemir had taught him that technique, the meticulous review of new notions, when he was a teen and had found himself baffled by the stark differences in the descriptions of ekkimaras, the most common, and monstrous, bloodsucker in the world. The old and wise Witcher had taken three different tomes, one of them from his private library, and told him to look for the differences and write them down, then had described the creatures himself, from his own encounters. Criss-crossing the different details of all four sources, he found out that there was truth in all the three books, and some trash too.

From that moment on, he never took what he read in books for granted, he used them more to find a confirmation of his own observation, and not the sole source of his knowledge.

He was more interested in the new variations of potions though. Though toxic, there were potions that were absolutely essential in his line of work. Witchers were trained to kill monsters, but they weren't infallible. They made mistakes, took a bad step, they could find an opponent stronger than they had thought or worse, more monsters than initially expected… incidents and problems were a staple of a monster slayer field day, and potions and oils gave them the edge they needed to gain the upper hand and overcome monsters.

Sometimes men too.

A sharp dressed man appeared in his field of view and threw a heavy leather bag on the table. By the heavy thud and clinking sound it made when it landed on the flat wood surface, it was full of money. "Five hundred orens. They're yours, if you beat that guy."

Oh, the brawlers.

Castle looked up at the man he was supposed to beat. Short, definitely overweight, round head and sunken eyes. His nose had been broken multiple times and he limped slightly. A soldier wounded in battle?

"Why should I accept it?" he asked.

"Gregor wants to see if he can win a fight against a Witcher. That's all. Free to accept or decline."

By the tone in his voice, he clearly wasn't free to decline. They'd probably force him to fight anyway, be it in a honest one-on-one brawl for the bets or an ambush outside the inn, one day or another.

He sighed. "Alright. Rules?"

"No bites. No magic. No weapons. Fight's won when one gives up or goes down and stays down for longer than ten seconds."

"That easy?" The man nodded. Castle closed the ledger and put it away in his backpack, along with the inkwell and the pen. "I need someone to keep my things."

The blond guy with the mysterious woman held up his hand. "We'll keep them, Witcher."

Castle took his things and handed them to the off duty guard. "You bet?"

The blond guy shrugged his shoulders. "A little. Just enough that if you win I will have enough to pay dinner and drinks for us."

The Witcher nodded. "I'll make sure you win."

With that, he approached the makeshift ring.

"Gentlemen…" the sharp dressed man started. "We have a new participant to our little tournament. Sir…"

"Richard Castle."

"...Sir Richard Castle versus our champion, Gregor. Chivalrously challenged, the Witcher here decided to accept the contest. You both know the rules. Let the best of you win."

He stepped back and let the fighters do their thing. Gregor's style was nothing more than drunkenly sway his huge fists as if they were hoes in a cornfield, he was powerful but really slow and predictable. Considering his body mass, it was more than comprehensible.

Castle swiftly evaded his assault, stepping laterally a couple of times before landing a jab to Gregor's nose. The massive man, taken by surprise, nearly stumbled on his feet as he held his bleeding nose. A thunderous roar started from the crowd as they cheered for the first blood.

He chuckled as the man, now extremely angry, assaulted him once again. He parried a couple of mean hooks that could have dislocated his jaw if they had landed and avoided a third one, ducking beneath it. He exploited the momentum to push his knee deep in his protruding stomach, full of beer, and immediately landing a punch to his solar plexus. The combined force of both the knee kick and the punch forced Gregor to double over, holding his belly and howling in pain.

Castle wiped his hair away from his face and studied his adversary. Gregor was clearly not a match for a Witcher and had bit more than he could actually chew. There was no need to humiliate him more in front of his friends. He went for one last punch to his face. His clenched fist collided with his cheekbone, hardened knuckles shattered his facial bones and split the soft tissues. Blood spurted from his face, a couple of teeth landed on the floor and then Gregor fell hard on the wooden tiles, grunting as he hit his head on the wooden floor.

He stayed down.

Everyone in the inn, even those not interested in betting on the brawls, was now watching the downfall of the local champion, by the hand of a stranger that had barely broke a sweat while beating his adversary to unconsciousness. He looked around and saw the guy that had offered to keep his things safe baffled beyond reason, same went for the other man and the black haired woman. But apparently, the mysterious guard that had caught his eye the other night was rather interested in his display of brutal force. He felt her piercing eyes delving deep into his soul, as if she was looking for the answer to a question she only knew.

"Well…" he said. "Guess I earned those orens…"

The guy that had recruited him handed him a heavy leather bag. He opened it, took some coins out and threw them at the innkeeper. "Next round's on me." The he took his backpack and his swords from the still astounded guard. "Thank you for you help, Officer."

"Ryan…" he added. "Kevin Ryan."

"Nice to meet you, Officer Ryan. And thanks again." He ran a hand through his hair. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I will retire to my room. Ladies, gentlemen…" He tipped his head and headed to the stairs.

Once there, he shut the door behind him and threw his things on the bed, then proceeded to take off his shirt and boots, throwing them at the foot of the bed.

Sighing, he realized he smelled like a stable, and some of Gregor's blood had stained his pants and his face too. He definitely needed to pay a visit to the public baths, but for the moment, the water in the jug left by the maid and the little soap he had with him would have to suffice. In the small, chipped mirror attached to the wall, he noticed he definitely needed to shave too, the brisk white stubble covered his chin and cheeks, scratching as he ran his hands on his face.

 _Ah, so many things, so little time…_  he thought as he removed his pants and undergarments, then he splashed some cold water on his face, neck and chest, felt it trickle down his abdomen, giving him an invigorating ticklish feeling on the marred skin. He took the small soapbar he always carried with him and dunked it in the bowl of water, then fiercely rubbed the wet bar on the critical spots to wash away some of the dust and blood that had accumulated on his skin after a long day in the library and after that fight. The droplets quickly became darker as they washed away the grime from his skin. He gathered some more water from the bowl and wetted his hair and beard and when he added the soap the lather that formed quickly turned into a sickly pinkish gray from all the dirt and blood plastered in it. The little water he had at his disposition wasn't nearly enough to clean himself as he wished, but it was something. He'd give any sum of money for a hot water tub, but it wasn't the time nor place.

Most of all because someone was approaching the door of his room. Light steps, swift movements. The sounds were muffled, he was probably wearing frayed leather boots. There was a slight hitch in the gait, either caused by a limp or by a sword hanging from the left hip.

Probably one of the friends of Gregor, downstairs, that wanted revenge for his humiliation.

Not even caring about his state of undress and the fact that he was still in the middle of his makeshift shower, Castle grabbed the knife he kept behind his back and hid behind the door.

The person on the other side knocked. At the lack of an answer, he knocked again. And again. After the third knock, left unanswered, he opened the door and stepped in.

Not even looking who the intruder was, the Witcher pounced like a cat stalking his prey. He silently moved from his hideout and grabbed the intruder from the back, his left hand holding him by the jaw and the knife pressed at the throat.

Only that, when the cold steel of the blade had already nicked the skin, he realized there was something wrong.

The intruder had long, wavy hair. It tickled his chest as he kept him locked in what could have been a deadly hold. No one among the brawlers downstairs had long hair. Also, he smelled like wild cherries, not exactly a manly fragrance. And it wasn't a cheap perfume, that he could tell for sure as a small cloud lifted off the person he was threatening to kill.

He looked down and saw the mystery woman, her beautiful face distorted by terror and shock, tears brimming in her eyes as she tried to remain as still as possible while his blade pressed against her pulse point.

As if electrocuted, Castle let her go and pushed her away, bewildered and terrified by his own behavior. He planted the knife in the wooden frame of the door and shut it. "What the hell are you doing here?"

The woman coughed and pressed her hand at her neck. A rivulet of blood oozed from her throat. "Do you threaten to kill everyone looking to hire you?" she asked, her voice broken and hoarse. "Hey, you're naked!"

He mentally smacked himself and walked to the bed where his towel lay, still unused, and wrapped it around his hips to cover at least the essential. "I'm sorry I… I thought you were one of the guys downstairs."

"Who? Those idiots that fight for money? They're still trying to set Gregor's nose," she explained, still pressing on the wound.

"I'm sorry." He fumbled around a pouch he kept attached to his belt and pulled out a small Celandine flower and a clean piece of cloth. He crushed and twisted the flower with his fingers and let the thick yellow liquid drip on the cloth, the held it close to her mouth. "Spit."

"What?!"

He groaned. "I'm trying to stop the bleeding. Spit, for fuck's sake!"

Not exactly happy, she obeyed. "That's disgusting…"

"Yeah, but effective," he said. Then he rudely pulled her hand away from her neck and pressed impromptu salve to the wound.

She grimaced. "It stings."

"It's mildly toxic, that's why it stings, but it will stop the bleeding and close the wound, leaving no scar behind."

"How do you even know it?"

"Witcher, remember?" He walked past her and pulled a chair from the corner of the room, then gestured her to sit down. When she was settled, he stood a few feet away from her. "So, you said something about hiring me?"

The woman nodded. "Yes, well… Now I'm not exactly sure I still want to hire you, after the stunt you just pulled."

He chuckled and folded his arms across his bare chest. "I wouldn't be surprised. It was incredibly rude and definitely awkward, I am deeply sorry it happened."

That tore a smile from her. "And they say Witchers have no feelings."

Castle shrugged his shoulders. "Common misconception. We're just better at hiding them than the normal population. By the way, I'm Richard Castle, professional monster slayer."

He extended his hand. Shifting her hold on her neck, she grabbed and shook it. The strength of her handshake surprised him. "Kate Beckett. City guard."

"Nice to meet you. So? The job?"

"Ah… yes… I want you to help me catch my mother's killer."

Quite a blunt request. "Uhm… isn't that the role of a City guard? Or of a detective?"

She nodded. "I hired Raymond Maarloeve and he failed miserably. Or more likely, he got too scared. Waste of money, I tell you."

"Where do I come in? I'm not a detective."

"You see… my mother was killed ten years ago. By a monster."

That caught his attention. Not the fact that the murder had happened a decade before, but the monster part. "How can you be sure?"

"The autopsy report states so, and I saw the body myself: mangled and half eaten. There were bite marks as big as a bear, but they seemed shaped like a human mouth. She was found a week after her disappearance in an Elven ruin beneath the City."

"Couldn't ghouls or drowners have caused the marks on the body?"

She shook her head. "No. The medical examiner determined all the bites and wounds were inflicted ante mortem. Groups of people stalked the sewers around the entrance of the ruin for weeks, but nothing came up."

"And you think a Witcher can find something normal humans can't? Hey, it's been ten years. Maybe the monster that killed your mother is dead."

"It wasn't the first time it killed, and it wasn't the last. In the past years, more than twenty people died by the hands of the same monster. One turned up just this morning, same marks, same place. The body is in the morgue at the moment."

That was interesting. Very interesting.

"Tell me more about it."

"Simple as it gets. Sometimes a body is found around town. Some in the sewers, some in the outskirts, some have been found in the swamp just north of here… it's never the same though, but it's always close to water. They all disappear and then, a week later, the body comes up somewhere, fresh and with no sign of decomposition. No traces to be found, no dragging marks, nothing. The alderman told the guards to stop looking for the responsible and put up a contract, but no one ever found anything."

"No Witchers claimed that contract in the past?" he asked.

"No, no one. Not that many of them come to Vizima these days, the ink on the parchment has now faded, I think, as it's been pinned to the notice board for years now. So? I'm going to pay you, and you can claim the contract too. Just help me find my mother's murderer, please. I can't do it on my own."

Castle thought about it for a long while before giving her an answer. A monster that had been in the same area for so many years… that acted always the same way, with so many victims… that was a dangerous kind of monster. A highly intelligent one, it seemed, as it kept its victims alive for a time before killing them. It didn't look good for the city.

Bitterly, he thought about his dead brother. He was the one specialized in the weird things. Together, they had seen the best and the worst the world had to offer in matters of monsters, and his big brother was like a magnet for the strange stuff. He had almost forgot the "normal" stuff, to the point he often asked his help to deal with more mundane curses.

He would have loved thisone.

"Let's say I help you. What do you mean bythat? Witchers usually work alone."

"Mister Castle…"

He stopped her. "Castle will be just fine."

She nodded. "Castle, I want to know what happened. And I don't want to hear a summary of it. I want to know, I want to see. That's why I want to follow you. I became a guard because I wanted to catch the bastard that killed my mother and threw my father down the rabbit hole of alcoholism. Is it too much to ask?"

"No, not at all. Just… I will need to examine the body and the place it was found. And the other spots, if you remember them. I can't ask to look at older bodies as I assume they've already been buried but…"

"Anything you want. I'm off duty tomorrow, we can start whenever you want."

She looked so eager to start, it was almost touching. Of course, it was a sore spot for her, as her mother had been killed, but she looked extremely interested in catching the monster no matter what. She took her job pretty seriously, apparently.

"Alright. Tomorrow morning then. I usually wake up pretty early, you'll find me downstairs at the usual table."

"You're not even going to haggle about the money?"

Castle scratched his chin, amused by the comment. "I have other sources of income. And considering how long that monster has been around, I highly doubt they are going to pay me one hundred orens or less."

She chuckled. The sound was like a melody to his ears, so used to people wishing he would die as they saw him. On the contrary, she was at ease with him, didn't treat him like an outcast. That was new.

"Good. I'll see you tomorrow then." She stood and walked to the door. "Goodnight, Castle."

"Goodnight, Beckett." And then she was gone.

He remained there, as if stuck to the wooden floor, naked except for the gray towel around his hips, thinking.

There was something strange about that woman, that Kate Beckett. He understood why she had decided to turn down the perks of being highborn, because she clearly was by the way she walked, spoke and acted, and become a humble city guard, but what he couldn't understand was her attitude towards him.

Rarely normal people like her acted so at ease with Witchers. Mostly, mages and sorceress treated them as human beings, and not even all of them were so well disposed towards his caste. But she was. Even after he had pressed a freshly sharpened knife at her neck, actually wounding her. Not to mention the blatant display of nudity, that let her see not only his private parts, but also the scars left on his body by more than half a century on the road fighting monsters and demons. That alone would have driven even the kindest person away. He was a grizzly sight, he knew it, and though he couldn't do much about it except for covering the marks with appropriate clothing, he was a little self conscious about it.

That woman was a mystery, he had guessed just right the night before down in the tavern, as he made up stories about her to fill the void of a dull evening. Stories that, fuelled by alcohol and weariness, had quickly become the source of his new novel. He had also guessed the reason she had become a guard. Not a small feature, that was sure.

He had her name now, he could stop fantasizing about a nameless woman that could or could not be a sorceress. Because that thought kept nagging at him. Usually sorceress released a magical aura, something he was trained to sense, but they also knew how to dampen it, so others couldn't pick it up, therefore there still was a chance she actually was one of the few female mages that roamed around the world, just like Witchers did.

This was going to be an exciting contract.


	4. Victim Profiling

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From now on I'm going to take a lot of liberties with the original material. Please forgive me, but I need to make the story work.

******Chapter 4 - Victim Profiling**

The next morning, Castle woke up even earlier than usual. The sky had just started lighting up, it had a grayish, gloomy shade that made everything dull and boring. The Temple Quarter wasn't exactly the most stylish place in Vizima, it gathered the houses of the poor population, the nonhuman ghetto, the hospital, the Melitele Temple, a brothel and not much else. Poverty reigned supreme, the streets were constantly covered with mud, blood and dung, and to be completely honest, Castle wasn't exactly happy to stay there. But it was close to the Temple and he needed to be close to the library and it was easier. Not to mention cheaper.

Yet, that morning, he had other things in mind.

Before collapsing like a heap of wet cloth on the bed and sleep soundly until the first light of morning, he had spent quite a lot of time thinking about the contract that had basically landed in his hands in the form of a beautiful woman that could or could not be a sorceress.

So many victims in such a long span of time and no one had ever thought of contacting a Witcher? He was going to talk to the alderman about it, if there really was a contract posted, he should have seen it in the past. He visited Vizima fairly often, he took contracts every time he was there and he had never heard of this creature.

That story stunk more than a Rotfiend. And those monsters stunk like dead fish and sheep shit, all mixed in a rotten mix that ruined clothes and forced the unfortunate people who found themselves in the radius of their explosion - because they exploded when they died - to literally boil themselves in scalding water and caustic soda to wash away the smell. He himself was once forced to shave his head because he could still smell it around him.

Anyway, he got dressed, strapped his swords behind his back and went downstairs. The wife of the innkeeper, a sweet elderly woman with big blue eyes and gray streaked black hair, greeted him with a smile. Contrary to her husband, she had always treated him kindly. It wasn't the first time he rented a room there, they knew him, but the owner kept treating him like crap. His wife, on the other hand, kind of cuddled him.

"Good morning master Witcher," she greeted him. "Did ye sleep well?"

He smiled. "As always, Mrs. Fitzgibbons. Can I help you?"

She shook her head. "No, I'm just fine." Her accent made him smile. "What do you want for breakfast? The usual?"

He sat at his table and nodded. "The usual will be just fine."

A moment later, a large platter with freshly baked rye bread, butter and apricot jam, with a mug of steaming milk mixed with roasted barley powder. He wasn't a fan of overly complicated meals, the simpler the better. Simple, easily digestible, energetic meals, that was his rule. Fighting a monster with indigestion wasn't exactly the best way to assure you'd get out of the fight with all your limbs still attached.

He was spreading the apricot jam on the second slice of buttered bread when the door at his right opened and Kate Beckett stepped in the tavern. The sudden waft of cool morning air brought in all the smells from outside, even the faint scent of celandine plants that grew just outside the city walls. It had rained a little bit that night, so the smell in the air was strong and sharp in the thick, humid air.

She looked around and when she noticed him, she walked to the table and sat in front of him.

"Morning," she said.

"Morning to you." She was different, without the city guard gambeson. Her clothes were tight and hugged her body perfectly. The black leather pants were a little worn, but well made. Tailored, probably, as was the white shirt beneath the purple doublet and the gray jacket. She was harmed, a sword at her hip and a dagger strapped at her thigh. The woman knew her way around steel too, the both looked high grade metal, with a great deal of craftsmanship in the blades and the hilts.

"Slept well?" she asked.

"As well as you can sleep in a ratty place like this," he replied, lowering his voice so the innkeeper's wife wouldn't hear him. "Want something to eat? Drink?"

"Same thing you're having."

A quick nod to the elderly woman and a second platter appeared in front of them, another mug too. "Now that we're both eating…" she started. "You have a plan?"

He nodded. "Yes, just as I told you yesterday. I want to look at the body, where it was found. And I'm going to ask around."

"You can skip the last part. I already did that, many times."

He smiled as he chewed on a big bite of bread, the swallowed. "With all the due respect, I have ways you guards don't have. I can make people talk pretty easily."

"You mean you're going to use the Axii sign on those who don't want to collaborate?"

"How do you know about Signs?"

Beckett chuckled. "I read. A lot. Even about you Witchers."

"And what do you know?" he asked.

She took a sip from her mug before she spoke. "Well, I know for instance you're of the school of the Wolf, given the wolfhead amulet hanging from your neck. I know you're pretty famous around here, specialized in curses and wraiths, but you can deal with monsters pretty well too. I also know you visit Vizima at least once a year around this time, that you usually spend a month here studying and that you always rent a room here."

"Wow… I'm impressed."

"Oh but there's more. I know you had an older half brother, that died in Rivia five years ago, his body never to be found, I know you write books to earn something on the side and that you're a vocal opposer, as your brother was of racism and you often took sides of the oppressed. And before you ask me how I do know about all of this, let's just say I wanted to hire the best, after Maarloeve failed to deliver."

He growled, softly. She knew too much. Things only a handful of people knew about him, all of them scattered around the world and one of them was dead.

He so wanted to ask her if she was a sorceress, but if she hadn't yet revealed it, there was a good reason. No need to scare a possible client away so early in the morning.

"As I said," he started. "I'm impressed. But with this set of skills at finding information, how come you didn't find anything about this creature?"

She smiled. "I'm good at following leads of people that leave tracks behind. This monster doesn't, or at least it doesn't leave tracks I can follow. That's where you come in."

Castle nodded. "I see. Come, if you're done with your breakfast, we can go."

"You sure you can walk in a morgue right after breakfast?"

"Beckett, please. I kill monsters for a living. After you kill your first zeugl, you're ready for everything, even a stroll in a morgue right after breakfast."

He paid for their meals and they walked out of the inn. The city was lazily waking up, only shopkeepers and the casual drunk sleeping the hangover off were on the streets. Even the guards were missing. Beckett guided him to the morgue, not far from the graveyard. On their way there, they encountered a heavily armed patrolman with a different coat of arms from the city guards.

"Hey, who's that guy?" asked Castle as they passed him by.

"Who? The knight? One of the guys from the Order Of The Flaming Rose. They're like… I don't know… special forces? They arrived here about six months ago, took over that building up there and started patrolling the city. Simple as that."

"Do they make a difference?"

Beckett shrugged her shoulders. "Not a bit. We still have our issues with criminals and monsters in the sewers, things we have to deal with. The only difference is that the Temple of Melitele is quickly losing regulars during functions while the cult of Eternal Fires gathers more. What do you think?"

"Bah… religion's not my cup of tea so I try not to think about it. What do you think though?"

"They're self righteous pricks that don't have a fucking reason to be here. They give us hell and do nothing to help us. I wish they'd just get the fuck out of Vizima and leave us be. We're not perfect, but damn it they're making everything worse with all their freakin' preaching and everything. By the way, what's a zeugl?" she asked turning in a closed alley and heading towards a small door recessed in the thick wall of a building.

Castle sighed. "You don't want to know. We're here?"

"Yes. Ready?" He nodded. She opened the door and let him in. "Lanie! I'm here!"

The dark skinned woman from the other night was standing near a stone table with a dead body laying on it. "Oh, you got him. Is he alright with dead bodies?"

"Ma'am, I'm a Witcher," he interjected. "As I said to Kate just a moment ago, once you kill a zeugl, there's nothing that would make me throw up."

The woman, the medical examiner apparently, nodded. "If you're sure. Come, the body you want to see is here."

She guided them to the back of the damp, dark room, to a slab of stone propped up against a corner. "Here he is. Mathias Rockford, Redanian," she read from a parchment attached to the toe of the body. "Reported missing eight days ago by a fellow merchant and found yesterday morning in the old elven ruins beneath the city. Cause of death, undetermined, but I suspect it was blunt force trauma to the back of his head." She turned the head and showed them a large wound that left the cracked skull exposed.

Castle nodded. "May I take a closer look?"

"Be my guest, Master Witcher."

"Drop the formalities. We're colleagues, in a sense."

With that, he ignited a torch hanging by the slab with a quick flick of his fingers and moved the source of light closer to the body, in order to see better. Upon a first, cursory look the body was definitely in bad conditions. Rigor mortis had come and gone already, meaning the poor man had died more than twenty four hours earlier, and he had little blood left in him, considering the severed arm, the large missing chunk of thigh and the missing guts too. Large, monster-like bites covered his skin, some superficial and some deep enough to cause copious blood loss. All wounds were ante or perimortem.

"Alright, definitely a monster," he declared. "Beckett, can you hold the torch? I need both hands."

He rolled the sleeves of his shirt up above his elbow and went back to examining the body. Careful, he started a very scrupulous search for traces and anything left behind by the murderer. "You still have the clothes?" he asked.

Lanie nodded. "Yes. They're in a bag beneath the table. You can look at them too, if you need."

"Thank you." Then he went back at the body. He examined the head first. The wound in the back of the head had been caused by a cylindrical object, probably a blackjack of some sorts, wielded by a very strong arm, and it was indeed the cause of death. Bruising of the scalp around the ragged edges of the wound proved that blood still flowed in the poor man's body when the fatal blow had been administered. He looked through the hair and ears, found traces of dust and some scented oil residues on the skin and hair. Same traces of oil around the eyes and the mouth. In fact, the head was the only part of the body that lacked bite marks or wounds of any kind.

"Did you notice that the face is unscathed, save for the wound in the back of the head?"

The two women took a long look at the body before nodding. "Yes. Any particular reason?"

"Repellant oil." He pressed his thumb beneath the left eye and gathered a little of the residue on his finger, then smelled it. "Dog tallow, wolfsbane and bryonia. Common repellant for both werewolves and lesser vampires. Not enough to cause the beast to coward but just enough to make it avoid the face. Did the other bodies have their faces intact too?"

"Yes," replied Beckett. "They were all recognizable, untouched."

"Mmh… sounds like premeditation to me."

"You mean this is not the work of a monster?" asked Lanie.

"Oh, it definitely is the work of a monster, but the body has been used as a bait by someone that wanted to hide a murder, that's it."

"That means?"

"Give me more time. You said there were no traces left where you found the body?"

"Not one."

He cleared his throat. "We'll see about that. Let me finish."

Slowly, he examined the rest of the head. Around the nostrils he found some white powder. Fisstech, probably, the favorite drug of the moment, easy to produce, cheap and extremely addicting. When snorted or rubbed on someone's mucosa, usually the gums or the inner lining of the mouth, it had narcotic effects. It was sometimes used, in deliberately small doses, as a painkiller for treating extreme wounds, as it had a very quick effect. Here, apparently, the merchant had been kept sedated with it. There were no signs of defensive wounds anywhere on the body.

Out of habit, being used to dealing with monster corpses to extract the valuable parts for his potions or to sell as trophies, he checked the mouth of the merchant.

"Ah! As I thought. The tongue's missing," he exclaimed.

"Surgically removed," added Lanie. "It's the first time though, I checked the reports on the other bodies found in the past and everyone of them still had the tongue."

"Whoever is doing this, he or she has a ritual and uses a monster to torture his or her victims. By the type of wounds, I dare to say we're dealing with a lesser vampire, a fleder maybe. Most of them hibernate if they don't find food, so it's kind of easy to keep one in captivity and awaken it when it's required. You said something, yesterday, about bodies being always found near water. The elven ruins you spoke of, are they close to any water way?"

Beckett nodded. "Yes. The ruins are crossed by the sewers."

"Then I suspect that the ruins are the dropping spot, but sometimes they are flooded and bodies are caught in the undertow and dragged somewhere else. That would explain the fact that all the bodies are found close to water and with no traces left on them."

The medical examiner thought about it for a moment. "That's plausible. The first solid theory and lead we've had in years actually."

"Beckett, when people disappear, do you patrol the place?"

She shrugged. "Used to. After the third body appeared there as if by magic, with a squad of armed guards patrolling the ruins, the alderman gave up."

"Mmh, magic involved. Maybe there's a portal or something like that… I need to see the place though to be certain."

"You're thinking of residual magic there?"

He frowned, observing the mauled body in front of him. "Might be. Won't know until I see it. Wouldn't be bad to see even a couple of other places where other bodies have been found too."

"Can be arranged."

"I'll go and retrieve the files about the most recent murders," stated Lanie. "Last two? Three? Five?"

"Five will be fine, it's not like we have all the time in the world, we have a serial killer to catch."

"So? It is a serial killer?" asked Beckett.

"Oh definitely, a serial killer with a monster in the basement. A monster he uses to hide his crimes. And that makes him extremely dangerous."

Suddenly, that contract moved up a notch on his scale of interest.

Monsters and other foul creatures sometimes were nothing compared to some humans. Sometimes monsters were just victims of adverse circumstances, mostly caused by other humans, like botchlings and the very common drowners, and in that particular situation, the real monster was the man behind the trapped creature kept in captivity to satisfy his sadistic need to hurt and kill.

"Before I go, can I take a look at the clothes?"

Lanie pulled a bag from beneath the stone slab. "Here you go. There's a desk if you want to use it, over there."

The Witcher spread the clothes of the victim on the wooden table. Lacerations on the cloth coincided with the bite marks on the body. Blood and mud stained the once fine trousers and doublet, while the once red shirt was now completely soiled. The cuts indicated sharp fangs and taloned hands, so the hypothesis of a lesser vampire had some foundation indeed. He searched every nook, fold, and crease in the clothes, finding more traces of fisstech and pollen. It was spring, so it could possibly be due to the high pollen count in the air, but he took a mental note about it nevertheless, because it was verbena pollen, an uncommon potted plant.

Much to Beckett's disgust, he was very careful in his examination and also smelled the filthy clothes. Except for the mud, sewage and blood, he could distinctly pick up the smell of another man. As it hadn't been submerged by the sewer waters and not washed like the body, the cloth had retained all the smells of everything it had been in contact with. Around the lapel of the doublet and shirt, there was a faint but distinguishable scent, a high quality fragrance typically used by high society men. White musk with a tad of sandalwood, very common in Nilfgaard, less widespread in the northern kingdoms.

"Ladies, we're looking for a rich man," he declared.

"You sure?" asked Lanie.

"Hell yeah I'm sure. A rich man that likes cologne." He spread the shirt and doublet and pointed at their lapels. "He must have grabbed our merchant and some of the perfume, probably not yet dried up on his wrists, was transferred to the tissue, here and here. It's faint, but I could still pick it up."

The medical examiner sighed. "Must be so good to have enhanced senses in your line of work."

"Oh believe me, it's extremely useful, but it's also a damn curse on its own. Now, if I may… can you show me the ruins?"

"Sure, come with me."

They walked out of the morgue to find a slightly busier Vizima. Shops had opened, pilgrims and believers were coming and going from the temple, be it for a prayer before work or to ask the Sisters of Melitele, tame and obedient servants of the goddess, to heal minor wounds and ailments, and the streets were full of people busy with their tasks.

"Tell me about your mother," he said, breaking the silence.

"Why?"

"Victim profiling."

The guard sighed. "Well, she was a lawyer… from Redania. Both my parents come from Redania actually, and they worked here in Vizima at the Redanian embassy. That's all."

"Any connection with the other victims?"

She shrugged. "Nope. Many were beggars or workers. People easy to find at night, that few people would notice if they were missing. The merchant was the first important person killed after I think three total unknown."

"So there isn't a track to follow. Uhm… I was hoping our guy had a preference. Anyway, I suppose we'll have to go through the sewers to reach the ruins. You ready for that?"

"Stop asking me if I'm ready for disgusting stuff. I'm a city guard, I see filth every day," she explained. "I went down to look for the dead guy, I was one of those that hauled the corpse all the way up there, with Esposito and Ryan. I can deal with those kind of things."

Castle smiled, inwardly. That woman was incredible. She reminded him of Triss, a close friend -  _very close_ friend - that had a fierce character, strong enough to keep up with Lambert… and if she could keep up with that grouchy, sarcastic prick of his colleague, then she was a very strong person. A bit finicky about dirt, but Kate apparently didn't mind getting down and dirty. Literally.

But mind out of the gutter, Kate was opening the gate that led them inside the underground sewers of Vizima. It was time to get knee deep  _in_ the gutter.


	5. Of Serial Killers, Necrophagers And Natural Gas Deposits

**Chapter 5 - Of Serial Killers, Necrophagers And Natural Gas Deposits**

It wasn’t the first time he ventured in the sewers of Vizima. Sewers in general were a staple of the work of a Witcher, as they often offered a perfect harbor for monsters to hide, hunt and reproduce. From nothing but annoying critters to much more dangerous, fully grown nightmares of four legs, sewers had it all. Like swamps.

Monsters loved dark, dank and wet environments, that wasforsure.

When Kate closed the gate behind them, they were left with little light to see where they would set foot. Castle had enhanced senses, sight included, but Witcher training and mutations only went so far.

“You have a torch?” he asked. He could barely see Kate blindly palming the walls around the entrance, probably looking for the hinges holding one.

“Should be here somewhere.” He got it right.

Shaking his head, he slipped a vial from a loop in his belt, pulled the cork and drank the potion it contained. Barely seconds later, he retched, nearly throwing it all up as it quickly slid down his throat, burning the delicate tissues. He felt the toxic effects too, as his muscles contracted and released so quick it gave him cramps, and his stomach decided it was time to take his liver out for a very acrobatic dance around his guts.

“You alright?”

He groaned and squinted his eyes. The potion was already working. “Yes… it’s just potions are crap…”

“A potion for what?”

“To see better in the dark,” he explained. “It gives an advantage, so we don’t need to use torches in situations like these. We don’t see exactly like in broad daylight, but hey… it’s better than waving a torch in one hand and a sword in the other. By the way…” He flicked his fingers in the Igni Sign and a torch about two meters away from Kate ignited.

“Oh, thank you.” She pulled it from the hinges and looked around. “Alright… come with me.”

“With pleasure.”

She walked on the sidewalk, carefully avoiding the edge of it in order to avoid falling in the disgusting stagnant waters that flowed in the canal. She moved through the maze of corridors, nooks, dead ends and cave ins as if she wandered down there ever since she was a child. She probably patrolled these dank and wet halls regularly.

“You come down here often?” he asked, out of curiosity.

“Not more often than any other guards. We usually patrol only the halls closer to the entrances, except when someone disappears, then someone has to go down to the ruins once or twice a day, to check for a body. But I have a good memory, and I can orient myself pretty easily. That’s why I move so fine down here. Did you ever come here?”

“Once or twice, usually chasing Drowners and the like. I can hear them, deeper in the sewers.”

She snorted. “Nothing new… we’ve had them crawling all around the city, ever since the graveyard was infested, we have to dump corpses in here.”

Castle halted abruptly, appalled. Dropping corpses in the sewers was idiotic to say the least, never mind it was definitely anti-hygienic. He had to repress a gagging feeling that nearly made him puke his guts out.

“What the flying fuck?” he exclaimed, disgusted to the boot. “There’s a fuckin’ infestation of Drowners all around the outskirts, I had to chase a huge pack for days down by the mill not three days ago and then it turns out it’s just because you drop bodies in the sewers? I knew Temerians were crazy, but not to this point!”

“Hey Castle it’s not like Witchers grow in fields like White Myrtle!” she rebutted, sardonic. “If you had dared to take a look at the notice board you’d know there’s a contract up there for anyone who can kill the infesting ghouls or whatever has taken residence in the graveyard! Drowners are easy to take care of, even without a silver-plated sword, ghouls? Not so much.”

True. So very true. Drowners were dangerous when in packs, but usually weaklings compared to other monsters. Ghouls on the other hand… those were serious sons of bitches, tough as stone and hungry for dead flesh, just like all necrophages. No wonder they’d drop bodies in the sewers if the graveyard was infested.

“Could have told me…” He threw her a small bottle with a greenish liquid inside it.

“What’s that?” she asked as she grabbed it.

“Necrophage oil. You don’t have a silver sword, but this will make steel just as good for cutting down that type of monsters. I highly doubt what I’m hearing is just a large pack of Drowners. Just pour it on the blade then put it back in the sheath. It won’t be as efficient as silver, but still better than bare steel.”

She handed him the torch and pulled her sword out of its scabbard, then proceeded to apply the oil as he had told her. “I’ve always wondered why monsters are so terribly affected by silver.”

“Disruptive effect on magic. All monsters are susceptible to fluctuations in magic, but as dimeritium actually blocks magic, silver disrupts it to the point that sometimes weak monsters can’t survive even being close to silver.”

“You don’t even have to touch them?”

He shook his head. “For particularly weak monsters, sometimes it’s not necessary. It’s rare though. How far are we?”

Beckett took the torch back. “Not far, we’re almost there. Not a fan of sewers?”

“Not exactly. Not after I nearly drowned in slime and shit in Novigrad during an unexpected flood.”

She barely repressed a giggle, but he could hear her nevertheless. “What happened?”

“I was following the tracks of an ekkimara, a lower vampire. They’re pretty common in big cities and this one lurked in the sewers. Novigrad was built around the time Vizima was, so the sewers are pretty much like this, tall walls and a channel dug in the center to allow water to flow. I had been down there for a while and apparently a huge storm had come from the sea, it rained so hard that the sewers were flooded, with me and the ekkimara inside it.”

“And?”

Castle took a deep breath and listened to his surroundings for a moment before answering. There was something moving, lurking with them, deeper down the halls, but it was still far from them. He could speak without risking to be caught off guard.

“I ran. The wave caught up on me while I was nearly out, and was dragged down with it. I barely managed to breathe when I started tumbling out of control, with the heavy gear keeping me down in the undertow. Until I was pushed hard against a wall and it crumbled under the force of the tide and the sheer weight of my body. I landed in a brothel’s basement.”

“No way!”

He nodded. “Weird, isn’t it?”

“More like a cruel joke!” she exclaimed.

“Well, a joke it was, but it wasn’t cruel.” He chuckled at the memory. “The girls found me covered in slime and… I don’t even want to think about it, helped me get cleaned up, offered clean clothes and a warm meal then sent me on my way. They just asked me to check on the attic because they feared a wraith had taken residence there. It wasn’t a wraith though; it was a confused ghost of a man that lived in the adjacent building. He wanted to stay in his home, just got misplaced in the process. I helped him find his way and everything was fine.”

“You’re a resourceful man…” she mumbled, as if lost in her thoughts.

“I try not to spoil any act of kindness. When people treat you like crap most of the time, you learn to accept anything even limitedly gentle thrown your way, be it a prostitute with a warm towel or a confused ghost that strangely enough doesn’t want to kill you.”

“I still have to find a good reason to hold Witchers to such low standards, but here we are,” she stated. She turned in what looked like a small alcove but turned out to be a caved in wall that had revealed a pre-existent elven ruin. There were unlit torches all around, and as they ventured deeper in the ruins, she lit them with her own. The vaulted ceiling was high and featured the remains of once rich engravings and decorations, now covered in mold and smoothed by time and neglect. It was a catacomb, a common vestiges of the once thriving civilization of the Aen Seidhe, the elves that populated the Continent before the arrival of mankind.

As Beckett lit more torches and more light came to his eyes, he noticed the first tracks. Diluted blood smears here and there, where bodies were dragged around by the tides, claw marks of necrophages, recent multiple trails of footsteps from the guards that had removed the last body. Things she couldn’t see with her own, normal eyes.

She pointed at a dark spot on the stone floor. “There. That’s where we found the last bodies. And my mother, for your information.”

Silently, he nodded and gave a precursory look at the room. _No tracks my ass_ he thought, as he found clear so many things to look at that he didn’t know where to start.

He decided to concentrate on the most obvious one; the big stain of coagulated blood on the ground, but this time, he wanted to let Kate participate with his musings. He pulled a torch from the hinges on the wall and knelt beside it. “See here?” He pointed at the very center of the almost circular spot. “There are at least three layers of dried blood. Did you have abundant rain last autumn?”

She nodded. “Yes. But this is the first body we found since last summer.”

“But not the first victim of the year. There are signs of washed blood, here and here…” he gestured at the edges of the spot, where the color was lighter and looked like someone had tried to wipe it, but it was only the effect of the clothes of the victim dragging on the stone when the floods took them towards the sewers. “Necrophage arrived earlier than you guards, see the tracks here? Or the victim was simply of little interest or without family to denounce his or her disappearance and you didn’t look in here.”

“That makes things worse, doesn’t it?”

“Far worse. Means the beast is hungry, and I’m not talking about the fleder or the katakan our guy keeps in his dungeons.”

“I get it. So… more victims than we calculated. Just… awesome,” she mumbled in such a sarcastic tone he figuratively felt the sting on his skin.

“Our guy also stays here with the victim for a while. He may have not when he dropped that body and you guards patrolled the area, but he did with the last one. There are two clean footprints, two yards on your left, of a stationary person. Heavy build, big feet, the soles of his shoes or boots are a little consumed on the external sides, so I suspect he has foot overpronation. Quite common condition, not exactly useful to identify him, but the more you know.” He moved away from the bloody spot and closer to the place where the murderer liked to stand. “But here we have… Hair. Short, neatly cropped and styled.” He picked it up and brought it to his nose. “And clean. We can rule out most of Vizima.”

“Our guy is rich, you already determined it. So far we have a rich, tall man with clean hair and a small defect of his feet. Wow… and I thought we had nothing to work on.”

Castle chuckled. “There’s more.”

“How can there possibly be more than this?”

“There’s magic.” He took his medallion off and threw it to her. “It’s vibrating. That means magic. And I’m pretty sure our guy moves in and out with a portal.”

Beckett handed the heavy medallion back and he quickly worn it again. He felt naked without it. “So we have to look for a mage.”

“Or a Source.”

And what she said about Sources, people with strong innate magical abilities, betrayed her.

“Don’t be ridiculous Castle, Sources are incredibly rare and there hasn’t been one ever since Pavetta died what? Twenty years ago? There’s her daughter, but no other Sources have been identified since Cirilla.”

First and foremost, how could a lowly guard know about what Sources were without him explaining it? But given she was highborn, maybe she had read it somewhere, but most important… how could she know about Ciri? His brother’s protegee and powerful Source, not to mention a child of the Elder Blood, a direct descendant of Lara Dorren, the powerful elven sorceress that married a human mage, and their daughter Riannon begun a lineage of powerful beings regarded as special.

Beckett paled, distinctly, realizing the big mistake she had just made. She had slipped, pretty blatantly, and had given him the final evidence he needed.

“So you’re a sorceress…” he stated, barely able to hide the amusement in his voice.

Sighing, she nodded. “Yes.”

“So why did a sorceress join the city guards?”

She shrugged. “Money. I needed money to survive. And it was a job that would allow me to monitor my mother’s murderer, but evidently this guy is way better than me. I knew about the portals, but the rest, what you discovered today just looking around? Not a clue.”

“Where did you get the information about me?” he asked.

“Triss Merigold. And to be honest I knew your brother. Not as well as Triss or Yennefer, but we worked together, years ago.”

“He never mentioned you.”

Kate laughed. “Maybe because I’m the only sorceress he hasn’t ploughed?” she said, quite entertained by the thought, by the tone of her voice. “I guess he wasn’t exactly keen to talk about the only woman in the continent that refused to be fucked by the almighty Geralt of Rivia!”

It made him smile. His brother was known to be a ladies' man, and he had a reputation both as a monster slayer and as… well… he fucked a lot of women when he was alive.

And it had always created friction between him and Yennefer, the woman he regarded as his one true love but kept him on razor’s edge, pulling at his strings like a puppet, bedding him one night and leaving him with nothing but his underclothes the next morning.

“Then, my dear Kate Beckett, you’re a rare pearl. Come on, let me look around some more, let’s see if I can find something useful.”

She let him work a little more, in silence, before she spoke again. “Triss spoke highly of you.”

Castle frowned. “Did she recommend me?”

“Sort of. She told me to approach you, in case you ever decided to visit Vizima around the time our killer struck again. Said you’re a good investigator.”

“Oh… I was kind of hoping she’d say I’m as good as Geralt as a Witcher.”

He had always lived in the shadow of his older, more famous brother, though they were both just as good. Only Geralt had the “luck” to find himself in more interesting situations than him. Also, being followed around by a famous bard like Dandelion that constantly wrote ballads about him helped his fame to reach the sky, while Castle was more of a normal kind of Witcher. Like Eskel and Lambert, he did his job but never meddled with the great affairs of politics, kings and queens.

Or Sources.

“She said that in some ways you’re better than him. She said Geralt was great with the uncommon, but you’re way better than him with more mundane tasks.”

Castle laughed. “Yeah, that’s Geralt for you. He hated studying. I highly doubt he’d remember the ritual to turn a botchling into a lubberkin, if he were alive.”

“Come on Castle, you know that ritual is risky, I can count on one hand the people that actually know how to perform it. And pull it off.”

“I know. Every angry spirit is hard to appease. Botchlings are spirits that have known nothing but torment and pain, they weren’t even born when they died. You can imagine how a not completely developed soul would feel if suddenly they’d be yanked away from the security of their mother’s womb and discarded like a piece of rotting flesh, not properly buried and often not even recognized?”

“Personally, I’d be angry as hell,” she revealed.

“Miscarried fetuses know nothing but that. Anger. Botchlings are more dangerous than people think. I’ve dealt with countless of them, and one was so angry and so thirsty for his parents’ blood that he nearly broke my leg. Damn that thing didn’t want to be sated, I had to slice him in half to get rid of him.”

“You guys have a tough job…”

“Don’t even get me started.Alright, I don’t think I can find any more clues in here. I guess the residual magic isn’t enough to track down the destination of the portal.”

Beckett shook her head. “Already tried. There’s no residue useful enough for me to track it down precisely. It’s here in Vizima though, that I can tell.”

“Let’s get out of here. I’m getting a headache and there’s something coming this way, unless you’re willing to get dirty, we’d better get out of here.”

They walked out of the ruins, trying not to slip in the dirty water, and hurried towards the exit. They had been down in the sewers for so long they both couldn’t stand the stench of filth anymore.

“Mind to tell me why you didn’t tell me you were a sorceress?” asked Castle after a while as she guided him out.

“I’m here undercover. People don’t know I’m a sorceress, my parents kept it a secret because they didn’t want people to harass me. There has been some unrest against mages, sorceresses and the like. People don’t trust us and they don’t waste time to remind us. I was away from Vizima when my mother was killed, studying, and… well, let’s say I had enough problems with my dad being an alcoholic, I didn’t want people to spit at me in the streets because of my powers.”

He nodded. “Seems a good reason. Is he alright? Your father I mean.”

“As good as a recovering alcoholic may be. It’s tough, but he’s getting out of it. We’re doing good.”

“Glad to hear it. You mentioned…”

He didn’t finish the sentence. He heard something, the sound of scratching. Claws on stone, hard and sharp. Jaws with sharp fangs gnawing on dry bones, trying to extract the marrow from the cavities. Necrophagers.

He stopped, the soles of his boots practically nailed to the stones beneath them. His right hand went straight to the hilt of his silver sword. “Kate, stop…” he whispered.

“I heard it. What do you think it is?”

Castle shrugged as he pulled the sword from the sheath. “Could be anything from a drowner to a cemetaur, though it’s probably a ghoul.”

They heard a definite, low-pitched growl and the sound of splashing around. “Ghouls then… multiple, probably three or four, maybe more,” he stated. “You know how to throw fireballs?”

“How do you think I shoved your brother out of my room?” From her free palm, a small ball of fire appeared, levitating about three centimeters from her skin.

“Good… stay behind me. I’ll see if I can deal with these nasty little critters alone.”

Another growl echoed in the halls and it gave him the cue for which direction go and investigate.

They didn’t have to walk long. In the parallel corridor, they found a small group of ghouls feasting on a fresh corpse. What they saw was enough to make Kate gag, as she wasn’t used to the gory sight in front of her. Six ghouls were tearing apart the corpse of what looked like an elderly man, already quartered and divided between them. Among the ghouls, a huge gravier, a monster typically found where dead bodies abounded like graveyards or battlefields. It stood proudly on its feet in the slimish water, holding a leg in his taloned hands and banqueting on the meager meal. Blood dripped from his jaws, and the disgusting sound of flesh being ripped from the body filled the room. For someone not used to such a thing, it was absolutely unimaginable. And utterly disgusting.

“Stay here. If you see I’m having a hard time, shoot the hell out of them.”

Beckett nodded as he flicked his fingers and formed the Quen sign. A barely visible magical shield surrounded him from head to booth. He needed all the protection he could get. Graviers and ghouls weren’t only extremely tough and strong physically, some of them were also poisonous. Most of all the graviers, their saliva was caustic and hurt like hell when it came into contact with the skin, something he definitely wanted to avoid.

He carefully approached the group of necrophages, admiring the weird circumstance of such a diverse gathering of monsters actually working together in the dreadful task of dismembering the poor guy and not fighting each other to death. In order not to be detected by their acute senses, not too different from his own, thought not enhanced with mutations, he moved timing his slow steps with the almost rhythmic sloshing of stagnant water against the bank he was walking on. That allowed him to get closer without being noticed by the monsters.

It gave him a more than discreet advantage in the fight. Not that he needed it, it was a fairly easy situation for a trained, expert Witcher like him, but he wasn’t familiar with the terrain and the wet stones made fighting a lot trickier than the usual.

And he didn’t want to dive in sewage waters.

When he deemed he was close enough, he pulled a bomb from a pouch hanging from his belt. That would probably get rid of most of the monsters, leaving only the gravier standing if he was lucky enough. He ignited the sulfur-coated fuse rubbing it against a rough spot of his belt and threw it in the middle of the group of ghouls.

The deflagration echoed in the sewers in a thunderous cacophony of splashing water, monsters dying and screaming bloody murder for it, the actual explosive going off and the grapeshots flying all over the place, sticking in the monsters’ flesh with that sickening sound that made him gag every time he heard it.

When the dust cleared, he saw the corpses of the ghouls floating, dead, in the sewage, as he had predicted. But most important, the gravier was now alerted of his presence and he was angry. Better, he was totally pissed off. It roared as its pitch black blood poured from the wounds the bomb had caused and when it noticed Castle, it pounced, hungry for fresh meat.

But the Witcher was faster. The gravier approached, stomping in the knee-deep sewage water with big taloned feet, splashing water all around.

About three feet away from him, the hideous, bloody creature growled and bared its long irregular teeth to threaten him one last time before trying to tear his arms out of their sockets and feast on them. Castle took advantage of the short-lived distraction to draw the Igni Sign and the gravier was surrounded by bright flames. The oily skin caught fire in less than a second, and the monster started wailing in pain as half its body burned. It took a step back before bending over the water in order to put out the flames - a display of rare intelligence from a creature such as its kind -only then, the Witcher used his sword.

One single downward blow and he beheaded the monster. The silver blade not only cut, but also singed the already burning skin, sizzling like a piece of pork meat of a heated grill. The head floated down with the stream and disappeared, while the body, heavier, remained closer. He observed the broad, hunched back still on fire slowly bob along the filthy canal along with the dead ghouls.

“Ugly, filthy piece of crap…” he muttered.

“Nice clean work, Witcher,” stated Beckett behind him.

He shrugged and sheathed his sword. “Easy enough, but you never know with these guys.”

“I’ve had my fair share of encounters with necrophagers in my life, most of them while I couldn’t use magic, and that was a pretty neat job.”

“You must be pretty good with that sword.”

“Decent enough, but...” she sniffled the air, “is that gas?”

Castle did the same, looking around. Amidst the disgusting smell typical of sewers, there was flammable natural gas. And that wasn’t normal. It came from the corridor behind them.

Turning around, he noticed some bubbles coming up from the canal, about fifteen meters ahead of them, where the corpses of the ghouls floated around. And above the water, the distinct flickering of gas. The bomb he had thrown must have created a fracture in the bottom of the canal that evidently rested atop of a natural gas deposit. It was now quickly bubbling up and…

And the flaming corpse was floating right in that direction.

“Kate… run.”

He didn’t need to tell her twice. She spun on her heels and bolted towards the nearest exit, with him following suit, but it was too late. Too much gas with a live flame that was too close. The gravier’s body reached the fissure where the gas was quickly pouring.

The explosion was strong and contained by the sturdy walls of the sewers and the blast wave made them tumble, although Castle had been quick enough to grab Beckett and surround them both with an unfortunately short lived shield. It lasted enough to protect them from the initial shock, but the explosion was so powerful it surpassed the protective abilities of the Quen Sign.

What they didn’t expect was the literal shitstorm that roseas a consequence. The otherwise lazy and quiet stream of filthy water turned into a turbulent flood, heading to the first opening to vent the kinetic energy of the wave. Before they could even start formulating a thought of another protective shield, they were both submerged by the revolting wave and hauled in it, even faster than the wave that had submerged him in Novigrad all those years ago.

Castle managed to grab Beckett’s hand so they wouldn’t get separated and held on her tight until they finally tumbled out of the sewers, not even ten seconds later. Seconds that lasted like an eternity to him, and he guessed to her too.

The force of the turbulent flow pushed them out of the drain so hard that they jumped out of the canal and into the murky, muddy water of the dyke north of the City. They fell in the water with two loud splashes and then they got separated, rolling in the shallow waters. Castle’s harsh ride came to an abrupt hand as his back forcefully collided with one of the posts of the small harbor, and it knocked the little air he still had out of his lungs.

Hurting and breathless, the Witcher barely had a moment to collect his bearings when a hand grasped the lapel of his sodden shirt and pulled him up and out of the water. The same hand briskly wiped the mud away from his face and held his head afloat as he pushed a harsh gulp of air into his body, still winded a little.

“You alright?” asked the sorceress. “You hit that pole pretty hard.”

Castle nodded. “I think…” He ran his hands all over his body, checking for wounds or missing equipment. A minor ache at his left shoulder where he hit the post and no missing vials, pouches or swords. “Yes, I’m fine. You?”

“I’m in dire need of a scalding bath and disinfectant, but perfectly fine.” Her voice had a tad of commanding tone that made him feel strangely aroused, even in a horrific situation like that. “Come, I can make a portal to my house once we’re ashore. We've got a lot to talk about.”

_Oh, just great…_ he thought. _I hate portals._


	6. Appearances Often Deceive

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guys and gals, I need some help: I need to know if those who aren't familiar with The Witcher universe understand what I'm writing, like the setting, what happens, the monsters... if there's anything that you don't understand, write a review and tell me, I'd hate to write a story that only few people understand because I'm being too cryptic or relying too much on the Witcher's lore without explaining it to you. I've been mentioning characters from that universe, some have major roles and it can be confusing. If you don't understand something, just write it down and I'll try to be more explicit about them, explain more, use the Castle's characters "ignorance" on Witcher's line of work to explain things to you too.

** Chapter 6 - Appearances Often Deceive **

It was a family trait. They both hated travelling through portals, they couldn’t help themselves. The feeling of being forcefully yanked by their belt and thrown at light speed somewhere possibly thousands of miles away made them sick to their stomach, both of them. 

Alas, working with mages and sorceresses meant they often had to travel via portals. And yet Castle had to master the art of gracefully walking in and out of them. He usually stumbled and fell on the ground holding his stomach trying not to puke his guts out. 

Like in that occasion. While Kate elegantly walked out of the portal she had created, no matter the fact that she was covered head to toe in filth and drenched to the bone, he lost his footing right outside the portal and fell on the wooden floor whining like a child as he tried to fight off the strong wave of nausea that made him feel like someone was gripping his stomach trying to force his breakfast up his throat once again. 

“You know, if I hadn’t known you’re Geralt’s younger brother, I would have guessed right now,” she said, looking down at him, hands on her hips as if judging him. “You two have the same reaction to portals, the same glassy eyes… The resemblance is uncanny. Same father, right?” 

He nodded. “But different mothers.” He dry heaved a little bit. “You’re not making it easier though…” he groaned. 

“You’re the one that got us in trouble.” 

“Oh excuse me if I didn’t know Vizima's sewers were so fuckin' close to a natural gas deposit!”

She chuckled. “I was jesting, idiot. Come on, let’s get cleaned up.” 

“Do you have running water in the house?” he asked, as he gingerly stood up. 

“No, but if you know sorceresses, you know we are resourceful. If you noticed, we’re in the basement and I have two tubs right there, though one needs to be cleaned because I don’t use it much. I can conjure hot water on demand, I’ve got soap and upstairs I think I have something that would fit you while you wait for your clothes to dry after you wash them. You in?” 

“Of course I’m in! Just give me a tub and some water… Damn I hate sewers.” 

“Like any other person with a sane mind. Come on, help me with the tub.” She waved in the general direction of the worst lit part of the room. 

The old tub was a large wooden one, those usually used to wash large amounts of clothes or bed sheets. It rested vertically, perched beneath a shelf with vials and an alembic for alchemy and a low cupboard, covered in dust. Together, they pulled it out of its tight confinements and rolled it closer to the other, more used tub. 

“We could set something up to separate the two tubs, you know… for privacy,” he started.

She laughed, softly, as she raised an eyebrow in mirth. “Castle, please, I’ve already seen you naked.” 

“I know, but I haven't’ seen you. And I’d really like to keep it that way.” 

Liar.

Bad liar. He knew it; he had it written all over his face that he was lying. Bad. But apparently she bought it. Or didn’t pay too much attention about it, he wasn’t sure.

She threw him a rag and he used it to collect as much dust and dirt he could. “There, I think it’s clean enough.” 

“Cleaner than both of us, that’s for sure. Stand back, I’ll conjure the water.” 

He did as told. He stepped back and silently begun divesting himself. He took off the harness that held his swords and gently laid them against the wall, then the belt. Those needed to be cleaned separately, or better, be replaced completely. The sheaths were good, the swords could be cleaned or if needed restored by a good blacksmith, but the belt and harness? They were both made of porous leather, they were meant to be robust, not posh. It was good quality leather, but without the lacquer layer that usually covered other items made of leather to make them look shiny and smooth, they absorbed water and everything that came with it. 

He could try to wash them the best he could, but he would probably need to buy new ones. And the harness that held the swords on his back had to be custom made, because sane people held their swords at their hips, not on their back. 

Oh well, such is life. 

He was taking off the soaked, stinky, once-white shirt when he heard the sudden splash of water. Looking up, he saw Beckett standing between the tubs, now filled with steaming clean water. She looked at both, apparently satisfied with the result of her quick incantation. “Not bad…” she said. “Throw the dirty clothes in that corner; we’ll take care of them later.” Then she turned to a wardrobe and pulled out towels for both of them. She placed a couple of them on a table beside his tub. 

“We’re lucky some of the filth was washed away when we plunged in the dyke.” 

“And got replaced by mud, don’t know what’s better.” She threw him a soap bar. “Get in there, Witcher. We’ve got work to do.” 

Castle pulled his boots off and threw them in the heap of clothes. They were lucky most of the disgusting residues had been partially washed away as they swam ashore, after they had plunged out of the sewers. “Let’s get cleaned up. I highly doubt the alderman would like to talk to a guy that smells like overflowing sewers. A Witcher, moreover. You know people don’t usually like us.” 

“Yeah, like people absolutely love sorceresses.” She pulled off her jacket and shirt. “So you really want to pull something up to separate the tubs?” 

He shook his head and took off his shirt. “I’ll turn around as you get undressed. When you’re done I can…” 

“I don’t mind if you see me naked, I already told you.” 

“Well I do!” he snapped. “I might be Geralt’s younger brother but that doesn’t mean I’m like him.” Then he turned around and faced away from her, allowing her to get undressed and into the tub. 

A thick, long silence fell between them. Standing there, his arms folded across his bare chest, he felt a little stupid. When people learned he was Geralt’s brother, they instantly assumed he was just like him, a playboy that more often than not couldn’t keep it in his pants. Like any other man, Castle loved sex, and he wasn’t one that would renounce a woman to warm his bed, but not like this. Never mix work and sex, he had learned from Geralt’s mistakes. 

Sex and work? Nope. No way. Never in his life. And it didn’t matter if Kate Beckett was kindly offering it on a silver platter. Or… a wooden bathtub. 

“You can turn around,” she said. “I’m pretty decent, everything considered.” 

Grunting, he took off his soiled trousers and underwear then plunged in the hot water. Sinking down beneath the surface, he relished the scalding sensation on his skin and felt that sickening feeling slowly fade away as the muck and dirt peeling off his skin. 

He reemerged about thirty seconds later and wiped the floppy, soaked hair from his face. “Now… I feel better.” 

“You don’t say…” she replied, sardonic. “What do you want to do next?” 

“Next? First and foremost, I want to get rid of the stench. Second, I want to talk to the alderman about a couple of things and see if I can get admitted in the Royal Archives. I need to do some research before I tackle this bastard.” 

“Any idea?” 

“We’re dealing with a deranged kind of man here. If I’m right and he actually keeps a fleder in the basement to hide his murders… damn, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this. And I’ve been on the road for a long while,” he explained as he rubbed the soap through his hair. “My idea is to get rid of it as soon as we can, but I need to know more. Modus operandi, time between each murder… things like that.” 

“I’m sure Lanie will have the other victims’ notes in no time. She’s got her hands full, with the plague and everything, but she’s a quick worker.” 

“And a very understanding one.” Cupping his hands, he gathered some water and washed away the suds from his head, then rested his arms on the sides of the tub. “Man I could get used to this…” 

“Hot water on demand?” she asked, rubbing the soap in her own mane to wash away all the grime. “You could settle down in Novigrad, the baths there are awesome.” 

“And deal with the Church Of Eternal Fire every day? No thank you. I travel there from time to time, but staying there? Not for me. But hot water on demand is awesome. I just wish I had my razor with me, I’d shave too.” 

“Sorry, can’t help with that. That wound though? On your forearm, it’s recent?” 

Castle looked down at his left arm, where the bruxa had bitten him ten days earlier. “This? Higher vampire, ten days ago. I was hired to get rid of a succubus, found a bruxa that had taken possession of a manor and all the people living there were under her spell. I was stupid and underestimated her, she nearly overcame me and the first idea I had in mind was shoving my arm in her mouth when she tried to bite me.” 

“Must have hurt like a bitch.” 

He shrugged. “No more than an alghoul spike through the calf.” He lifted his right leg and showed her the twin scars that ran diagonally on his skin. “Entered here.” He pointed at the scar closer to the ankle. “And exited here. Through and through with little resistance from a once very sturdy leather boot. It was a pain to throw that pair away.” 

Beckett laughed. “I thought the spike was the painful part!” 

“Yeah, but wounds heal! Boots with holes like that can’t be repaired, they need to be replaced. And I loved that pair of boots!” 

Shaking her head, she giggled. “You’re a strange man, Richard Castle.” 

“And you’re a strange woman, Kate Beckett. Tell me though, how did you meet Triss?” 

She entwined her fingers and place her hands behind her head, as a pillow. “Long story short, we met one day in Novigrad ages ago and hit it off right away. We became friends and… something more from time to time.” 

Knowing Triss, Castle wasn’t exactly surprised. “That sounds like Triss…” he murmured. “And you asked her about me?” 

“Told you, I wanted the best. And the best she could suggest was you. She said you’re driven, concentrated and that you know how to do your job neatly. Exactly what I was looking for.” 

He nodded. “Glad to know. Damn it’s been a while since I saw her. How is she faring?” 

“Splits her time between Kaer Morhen and here. She’s King Foltest’s advisor.”

“Damn she’s doing a good job if he passed such a fucked up law that messes up so much with non-humans,” he replied, slightly disappointed and definitely sarcastic. 

“She’s his advisor about magical matters. Laws and other things like that aren’t her expertise. From what she told me, she had no word in that law; no matter how loud she spoke against it. And Foltest’s an idiot, not to mention he’s a fool and an incestuous rapist, what do you expect from that kind of man?” 

“Nothing different...”  He softly banged his fist on the side of the tub. “But enough soaking up, I don’t want to look like a prune when I go talk to the alderman. You take your time, I can deal with him.” He stood up and grabbed a towel that he tied at his waist, while using the other to dry his hair and body. Kate’s sudden intake of breath wasn’t missed by his fine ears. “You mentioned some clean clothes that might fit me?” 

She took a deep breath, maybe to calm herself down. “Yes. Upstairs. Give me a moment and…” 

He gestured her to stay where she was. “Don’t. Just tell me where they are and I’ll take care of finding them.” 

“And have you snoopingaround my stuff? No thank you.” She stood up and Castle barely had the time to turn around. He couldn’t help but catch a glimpse of her naked, wet body and feel slightly embarrassed by the sudden arousal that coursed through his body. He heard her trafficking with the towels. “You can turn around. Damn, I’ve never met a more prudish Witcher in my life.” 

“Guess it’s what makes me one of a kind.” 

Castle let her guide him upstairs. For a woman that lived on the salary of a city guard, Kate’s house was nice, decently big and most of all, clean. Being on the road for the better part of the year, he appreciated tidiness and cleanliness when he saw it. It was colorful and bright, full of light, unlike most of the houses in that part of the world, swallowed by the smoke of tallow candles and low quality oil lanterns. A sight for sore eyes, considering he currently stayed in one of such places. 

“Stay here,” she told him before heading towards what he thought was her bedroom. He was alone for a while in her living room, and out of politeness so he wouldn't snoop around too much, he walked by one of the tall bookshelves. The books were pressed on them, to make them fit. She had so many of them they were really tightly pressed in the wooden structure. Many were tomes about magic and alchemy, and he knew some of them by heart. He smiled when he noticed a well worn out copy of “Ghouls And Alghouls” as it brought back some fond memories of his childhood and teenage spent at the fortress of Kaer Morhen with his fellow students. That book was boring as fuck, but damn that thing taught him how to survive…

But the biggest surprise was the whole collection of his own books, carefully lined right in his line of sight. Some showed more signs of wear than others, but they had all been read more than once. The leather spine of “In A Hail Of Bolts”, his first book, was cracked and nearly fallenapart. It was hard to see the golden title printed on the leather cover. 

The sorceress returned some minutes later. “Here. I hope they’ll fit.” She handed her the pile of clothes. “If you can wait a moment I’ll get dressed and wash your boots.” 

“Kate, really. Take your time, I know you’re upset. That thing that just happened? It’s Witcher’s work, not a sorceress’. You were kind enough to come with me. Getting submerged in that stuff can be overbearing, I get it. Take your time and if you want to soak in the tub a little more, you’re free to do it. I can take care of my things.” 

She shook her head and smiled. “Thanks Castle, but other than a sorceress, I’m also a city guard. I’m used to be covered in shit, be it real or metaphorical. But you see, as a sorceress, cleaning things for me is like the flick of a finger. Stop being the gentleman your brother never was, I get it; you’re not Geralt.” 

She had read him like an open book. And it blew him away.

The moment she had mentioned about knowing his brother and having dealt with his worst, womanizing side, Castle had started walking on eggshells. Because people not only tended to compare him to Geralt, they also thought that, considering they were step-brothers, they were also very much alike, even in that aspect. Truth was, he and Geralt were quite different, on that aspect. While Geralt loved to take his cock out and plough pretty much everything that had boobs and breathed, dryads included, Richard was much more… normal? Not that he didn’t have a long backlog of women he had bedded, but not as many as his older brother. Also, never when he was in a committed relationship. 

He had witnessed to many of Yennefer’s breakdowns when Geralt did something stupid - pretty much every other month - and that had taught him how _not_ to deal with a relationship. For a time there was Meredith, in Oxenfurt, and her beautiful little girl that called him Daddy even though he wasn’t her biological father, but their jobs forced them apart. Meredith was a minstrel, always travelling up and down Redania, and he was a Witcher, always travelling up and down the continent and often even the Skellige Islands… how could they make it work? But out of that disastrous relationship, Alexis came out as a strong, accomplished woman that worked in Tretegor, Redania’s capital city, as a lawyer. 

Anyway, in his zealous attempt not to act like his brother, he had sort of become a honey-coated spineless wimp, all about politeness and modesty. Evidently, Kate Beckett was made of something else and didn’t care much.

“Right… I’m sorry. It’s just… I don’t like being compared to him. Not in that aspect at least. We’re pretty similar in character and training, but that idiot sometimes can’t keep it in his pants!”

“Good thing you Witchers can’t sire children, or he’d be overrun by little Geralts at this point.” 

“Go and tell that to Yennefer.” The sorceress and Geralt’s on-and-off magically linked partner held a huge grudge about the fact that like the greatest part of sorceresses, she was sterile. Combine that with the fact that Witchers were also unable to sire children, and there went her instinct for motherhood. She had been lucky when Geralt basically adopted Cirilla as his protégée, after her mother died and her father decided it was time to retake his place as the Emperor of Nilfgaard, because the same way Castle had been a father figure for Alexis, they were Ciri’s parents through and through. That had helped her sate her great desire for motherhood. 

“Oh I know perfectly well. She came to me years ago, since I’m pretty known for my abilities as a healer, to ask if I could help her in any way.” 

“So you too got caught in that whirlwind… nice to know. We have something in common then. Listen, I’ll go and change, do you mind cleaning up my boots so I can go and talk to the alderman?” 

Beckett flicked her fingers and murmured some words he didn’t understand. “Done. Now go, I’ll take care of your belt and harness too. Go and see Lanie at the morgue, I’m pretty sure she’ll have the documents ready. ” 

He smiled. “Thanks, Beckett. I really appreciate it.” 

She nodded. “And they say Witchers are heartless…”

* * *

 

The alderman, the closest thing to a mayor in the city, languidly sat in his padded chair, skimming through the accountant’s book as he reviewed it, when Castle entered in his office. “Sir, do you have a moment?” 

The corpulent man raised his eyes from the large book on his desk. “What d’ya want?” 

“I’ve taken on the contract for the monster that kills those people in the sewers.” Then he slammed the faded piece of parchment he had taken from the notice board right outside. “I need to see the city records for disappeared people.” 

“On the account of the city of Vizima or fo’ a third party?” 

“The city of Vizima,” he lied. 

The man stroked his oily mustache for a moment, looking at him. Evidently he didn’t trust him. “Whateva. What d’ya wanna know?” 

“Who were the victims, when where and how they were found. You must have a record.” 

The alderman nodded, though it was kind of hard to tell, considering that he had no visible neck and the movements of his head were hindered by the stiff gorget. “On that shelf,” he barked, pointing at a bookshelf on his right. “Third from the floor, fifth book from the left, purple leather cover. Ya’ll find anything ya need. And now, get out of me sigh, before me eyes start bleeding.” 

Barely containing his rage, Castle walked over said shelf and pulled the volume out, then walked out. The alderman didn’t even look at him, or respond to his farewell. 

Sighing, the Witcher walked to the morgue, not too distant. He took some time to enjoy the warmth of the sun, after the plunge in the dyke - not to mention the tumble in sewage - that had chilled him to the bone. The sky was clean, with sparse fluffy white clouds that brought nothing but the sudden need to just lie down on a grassy field and relax, maybe reading a book that wasn’t about murders. Ah well, such is the life of a monsterslayer, he thought bitterly as he knocked on the door of the morgue. 

The door opened a moment later, Lanie appearing on the threshold with a bloody apron in clear view. That didn’t discourage him from smiling as she cheerfully welcomed in her small, creepy realm.

“I see you changed clothes. Had a little incident in the sewers?” 

He nodded. “Yes well… we encountered a pack of ghouls and a gravier and… I fucked up. I used a bomb to get rid of most of them, not knowing that the city is basically lying upon a huge natural gas deposit and… boom,” he explained, quickly. “Beckett was kind enough to lend me some clean clothes so I wouldn’t have to walk back to the Hairy Bear Inn covered in sewer water.” 

“And you also can keep working on it. I see.” She picked up a thick folder from a desk. “Here are all the annotations from the autopsies of the last ten murders. I was able to dig up a little more than you asked, it has been kind of a lazy morning.” 

“Thank you Lanie. Listen, I’ve got a question for you. While we were down there I noticed traces of more bodies than those that have turned out. Did you any strange unidentified corpses in the past six months?” 

The woman looked pensive. “Many beggars find their way on my tables during winter, many of them die of exposure because they are homeless and can’t find shelter from the cold. I had a couple of stab wounds last month, but mostly I deal with plague victims these days.” She paused for a moment, probably thinking about the bodies that had landed on her tables in the past year. “There was actually someone… or better something. Some time ago a brickmaker brought a bag from the swamp, it contained skeletal human remains. He said he found them one morning while out fishing.” 

“What kind of remains?” he asked.

“A leg without the foot, part of the rib cage, that appeared crushed by heavy impact, an arm that showed signs of gnawing here and there, which could be attributed to the animals and the monsters that inhabit the swamps.” 

“Drowners, ghouls and the like?” 

She nodded. “The occasional lesser vampire. There have been sightings of rotfiends, or so I’ve been told.” 

“Nekkers? Drowner deads? Bloedzuigers?” At her questioning look he decided to explain her a bit. “Nekkers are like drowners, only they don’t thrive from the spirits of the dead thrown in the water, and they are way more intelligent. Drowner deads are a different form of drowners, they usually spawn from the spirit of criminals not buried but simply thrown in the water or executed by drowning. Bloedzuigers are disgusting swollen creatures that resemble leeches,only they are twice my size.” 

And he was big. 

Lanie made a disgusted face. “Ugh… and people think my job is disgusting.” 

Castle chuckled. “Personally, I would never trade my job with yours, I like being outside, no matter how many monsters I might encounter on the path. But speaking of the remains, anything strange?” 

“Nothing that I could pick up. Probably you could, considering how amazing you were early this morning.” 

“Can I examine the remains?” 

“Eh, it might be a little difficult. They have already been interred in a common pit in the cemetery, before the ghouls appeared.” 

He rubbed his hands on his face, scratching the beard. “Damn there’s that thing too. Alright, let’s rule this body as accidental death in the swamps, I can’t investigate on that too. Now… I’ll study your annotations and the volume the alderman was so kind to lend, then we’ll see what will happen.” 

“Right. In case I remember something I know where to find you,” said the medical examiner. “But before you go, let me give you a hint; go at the Temple and ask around. They welcome many beggars and homeless people there, it has almost turned into a hospital, considering they treat all the victims of the plague that ask for help, they might know something.” 

“You think the non-human population might have anything to say?” 

“Yes,” she asserted. “There have been many victims among elves and dwarves, they might have seen something. You should ask in the inns and taverns too.” 

“Shopkeepers?” 

“Everywhere you deem it might help you. We need this to be over, absolutely. It’s been going on for too long and I’m scared,” she revealed. “Javier has to accompany me home every night, I’m really, really scared.” 

“And this Javier is…”

“Oh sorry… he’s my boyfriend, one of Kate’s colleague and friends.”

He nodded. “Alright… I guess it’s time to work on what I have. I hope Beckett won’t mind if I use her living room as a base for today.” 

“As long as you don’t snoop around, she’ll be fine. She very protective of her privacy.” 

He had noticed. “I see. Well, time to get back to work. Have a nice day.”

* * *

 

Castle entered Beckett’s house with the spare key she had given him earlier and stopped in the foyer. “Beckett? I got what I was looking for. Mind if I temporarily take residence here to work?” 

Silence. 

“Beckett?” he called again. Still no answer. 

“Damn…” he cursed. He didn’t want to intrude, but he needed to get to work as soon as he could. He could always go back to the Temple library and work from there, but he had to admit the dark and dusty halls weren’t exactly as appealing as the bright and colored living room just three steps ahead of him. 

He had to decide. Did he want to risk looking like a creep by using her house while she was gone, or did he risk a massive headache because of poorly lit study environment? 

“Oh for fuck’s sake…” he said as he walked to the table in the center of the living room. He set the book and Lanie’s files on the wood surface then sat down. “I’m working for her after all.” 

He pulled the first file from the folder and delved into all the disgusting, creepy and revolting details of the most interesting contracts since he left Kaer Morhen. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tiny little detail about the canon: sorceresses have a long life span. Actually everyone that deals with magic tends to live up to five, six centuries. Witchers too have an extended life span. It's canon that most sorceresses are bisexual in the Witcher universe. Mages too. It's really really common. Some are explicitly lesbian, some are simply bisexual.


	7. Chapter 7

**Chapter 7 - Start At The Base**

There were a total of twenty seven certain murders attributed to the "monster", or as they had learned, the serial killer. All presented signs of mutilation all over the body but the face was left always intact. Turned out that the missing tongue, surgically removed, wasn't actually an evolution of the modus operandi, rather a rare but recorded occurrence. Five more victims had been further brutalized by the removal of the tongue, while a couple had missing ears, one had an eye plucked out with no traces of carrion birds or monsters doing so.

It was an additional act of violence perpetrated on an already devastated body.

That made him literally want to puke, and considering his line of work, Castle had a pretty strong stomach.

The alderman master book had little useful information. The modus operandi was pretty much the same, with minor differences possibly due to cross contamination of the crime scene with other monsters, or carrion animal that had tampered with the body.

It was a waste of time.

Lanie's notes were a little bit more useful, but nothing more than he already knew. It was time to hit the streets and ask around.

He was working for a contract after all and one of the first thing a Witcher does after taking on a contract is talk to the people living around the area the monster, or whatever, attacked. Official records were not helping him, maybe the peasants would.

Quickly, he tidied up the table, putting all the documents back in their files and piled them in a neat tower then arranged everything he might need in the future. He found a piece of parchment, an inkwell and a pen and wrote a small note to Beckett, telling her he was down around the Temple of Melitele asking questions and that he would be back in an hour.

He went downstairs, intentioned to clean up his belt and harness, so he could bring his gear with him, only to find them spotlessly clean, carefully laid on a table. Even the swords had been thoroughly cleaned and oiled and were now resting out of the scabbards to air dry. The leather harness and belt he had thought ruined by the sewage were actually perfectly clean, in pristine shape. They almost looked brand new, Kate had done a great job cleaning them.

Without wasting any more time, he clipped the belt at his waist and strapped the harness around his chest, so the heavy swords rested comfortably on his back. Finally feeling whole, with his gear close at hand, he walked out of the house, locked the door, and headed to Temple.

There, instead of entering from the side door and head straight to the library, he went in straight from the front door. There, a young girl, novice of the order that worshipped the goddess Melitele, welcomed him with a bright smile and the palest pair of eyes he had ever seen in a human. "Good morning, Master Witcher. How can I help you today?"

"Good morning Sister," he greeted. "I need to ask a couple of questions about the murders that have taken place in the city, as I've taken on the contract issued by the alderman to stop this monster."

She nodded and gestured him to walk down the aisle of the Temple. "Yes, I understand. Who do you want to talk to?"

"I've heard that many beggars and people in need often find their way to the Temple, I'd like to talk to them, they might have seen something."

"I understand. Why don't you talk to the head priestess before you do? I'm only a novice, I don't know if I can allow you to approach our guests just like this."

Castle nodded. "I see. If you can put me on the right track, I'll speak to the priestess and ask her permission to talk to your guests."

The girl led him down the aisle and to a small corridor opposite to the door that led to the library, into a part of the Temple he had never seen. It was a small maze of corridors, with priestesses toddling around and about, carrying kettles of food and fresh linen, probably for the  _guests_ , afflicted by the plague, banished to a remote corner. The young novice then opened a door and let him in a cramped office where an older woman sat at a thick wooden desk, darkened by the years, was carefully preparing a potion. The bright red liquid bubbled in the alembic and the faint scent of celandine wafted in the room, along with the spicy smell of cheap vodka, definitely used as a potion base.

"Excuse the intermission but, White Gull would work a lot better as a base for a healing potion," he stated, out of habit.

The woman pushed the hem of the veil out of her line of sight and basically zapped him with a single glance. "If you want to kill the unfortunate soul that drinks that."

"You can dilute the concentrated potion with water. It would require administrations over time, but it would work."

She gave him a minute nod. "Possibly. Now… why are you here, Mister Castle? Our agreement offered you free access to the library, but you weren't supposed to disturb our work in the Temple."

"That's why I'm here. I took on a contract on behalf of the City of Vizima about the monsters that from time to time kills someone in the sewers, and I need to do some investigation."

"And I repeat my question, why are you here at the Temple of Melitele?"

"To ask questions. I don't intend to disturb the quiet of the Temple, but I've been told that many people take refuge in the Temple, people that often spend the night outside. I only want to ask them if they saw anything about that."

The priestess sat back on the chair and observed him with eyes veiled by the cloth of her headdress. "I don't like your kind."

Blunt and direct, devoid of feelings. Castle was used to that tone and had heard that sentence repeated at least a thousand times in his life.

"You and the majority of the population," he replied, just as blunt. "I don't like you either, but that doesn't mean I can't be civil."

"At least you're sincere. Rare quality, among you mutants."

"You've met the wrong type of mutants," he said, dryly. "So, can I go and ask questions? I'll try not to be too frightening."

"With those eyes, hair and swords, I doubt you'll be, but yes, you can go."

"And I thought the white hair gave me some charm, but thank you."

With that, he turned around and moved out of the study. He walked back to the main part of the Temple then into the smaller building where they had arranged a makeshift hospital. There were camp beds lined on the walls, with victims of the plague resting there, awaiting death. There was also a corner where healthy homeless people sitting around a table for a cup of warm herbal tea and a free meal.

To avoid scaring them, he took off his harness and left the swords by the door, then walked up to the table. "Mind if I sit down?"

The tablemates, six men and a woman, all emaciated, filthy and grim, looked up at him and shrugged their shoulders. "Whatever…" mumbled one.

Castle picked up a wobbly chair and sat with them. A novice came and asked him if he wanted something to eat, but he politely declined, asking only for a cup of water, which was promptly deposed in front of him.

"I don't want to disturb your meal, but I need to ask you a few question about the monster that from time to time abducts and kills someone."

One of the men, clearly a war veteran given the scars on his hands, face and the peg leg, stared at him as if he had asked for ten pounds of gold. "What for? Do you think any of us is involved?"

Castle shook his head. "Never in my life. You see, the City of Vizima issued a contract for that monster and I've taken it. I've looked for official sources but found little to nothing, I've visited the crime scenes and found something but now I'm looking for witnesses. Have any of you seen anything around the time of the disappearances?"

They shrugged their shoulders in unison, but one of the two women had a strange look in her veiled eyes, as if she was scared.

"Ma'am, is there anything you want to tell me?" he gently prodded.

The elderly beggar looked at him, straight in his catlike glowing eyes and sighed. "I… I think I saw something."

"Yeah, when you were drunk!" added the war veteran.

"Shut up. What do you think you saw?"

"Last week… I was outside the New Narakort Inn begging for a coin or two… I saw the merchant that died coming out of the tavern with a man."

"Do you remember anything about him?"

The woman toyed with the spoon. "He was big, really tall. Broad shoulders. A noble, or a rich merchant, something like that."

"Anything else?" he prodded. "Every detail is important." Then he fished in his pouch for a couple of orens.

The woman greedily grabbed the coins and put them in her pockets before the others could pawn them. "He had a slight Kaedweni accent, spoke like the priest of the Eternal Fire down the road, all about purifying the evil of magic from the world… I didn't see his face, he kept a black hood on his head."

"Hey!" interjected one of the men, one that lacked a hand. "I think I saw that guy… I think he's an envoy from Kaedwen."

Interesting. "What makes you think he is?"

"Sometimes I hang around the embassies. Ya know, stinkin' rich whoresons all around, they like when people see them being generous with the homeless and… There's this guy, big, broad shoulders… always dressed in black… you'd mistake him for a Nilfgaardian, if not for his accent, I often see him around the Redanian embassy."

"What wouldastikin' Kaedweni do with the Redanians?" asked the war veteran.

"It's the Eternal Fire thing… the priest does special things in there…"

It made sense. The Church Of Eternal Fire was deeply rooted in Redania and the ambassador had enough power and influence to request private services in the embassy, for him and his rich friends.

"So let's see… Tall man, hangs around the embassy. Rich, dresses in black and is a member of the Church, was seen leaving with the dead guy the night he disappeared," he repeated, looking at the poor people around him for confirmation. "Anything else?"

"Blue eyes," added the one with the crippled hand. "It's the only thing I could notice beneath the hood. Deep blue eyes. And dimpled chin."

And that was only the first top of his tour of questionings. He wondered what he would find at the inns and at the brothels. "Good. Thank you guys." He took some more coins and equally split them among them all. "Don't waste 'em on booze."

Castle stood up, grabbed his swords and headed out. Not that far from the Temple there was the inn where he had rented his room. It was worth a try, usually at that hour, right before noon, it wasn't too full and maybe he'd have the chance to talk to the owners and the waitress, usually overloaded at night, with dinner and the customers coming for a beer or two.

He'd also have the chance to go in his room and grab a notebook and take some annotations about what he had found out. It wasn't much, but it was more than when he had started, and he had started less than twelve hours ago.

Once in his room, he grabbed an inkwell, pen and a new notebook and wrote everything down, then went downstairs. There was only one customer at a table, eating a bowl of soup, far away from the bar, so Castle grabbed a stool and sat there. Soon, the innkeeper arrived. "What do you want?"

Ah, always nice and courteous towards him. "A pint of Champion." He placed some coins on the table in front of him, more than the price of his order. "And some information."

The man let out a noise that sounded like a rout as he spilled his beer. "'bout what?"

"The monster that killed the merchant the other day."

"Not much to say. Guards found the body in the sewers, guy was dead. Never seen him."

"Any regular customers among the other victims?"

The keeper placed the tankard in front of him. Some of the frothy foam spilled down the chipped glass. "My wife knows more. I'll send her down." Then disappeared in the back.

A few minutes later, his wife came out of the larder. "Master Witcher, my husband tells me you're asking questions about the monster. Why?"

Castle smiled. "There's a hefty contract on its capture or killing, it's been there for a while and it's time to do something about it."

"You sure you're not doing it for the coin? Never heard of kind-hearted Witchers," she teased him.

"The coin is a good incentive, yes, but I've heard this monster's been around for twenty years. It's not normal that an important city like Vizima can't have a monster hungry for human flesh at large. It's not safe."

"How nice. But tell me, what do you want to know?"

"Any customers among the dead? Any regulars that suddenly disappeared without a reason?" he asked, opening the notebook on a clean page.

"Regulars come and go, Mister Castle, often without a reason. But yes, three of our regular customers died because of the monster. One just before the first snow, last year," she explained. "A young woman, she was a tailor. Had a shop down the street."

"Sarah Miller?" He had read Lanie's file.

"Yes, her. She came down a couple of times a week with her husband. I was one of her regular customers, she used to make all our clothes and fix the linens for the inn."

_Did a nice job at that,_  he thought, knowing perfectly well the state of disarray the linens of the inn versed in even when the woman was alive and working on them. "What happened?"

"One night, it was the end of summer, she came here, alone. She sat at the bar until a man I had never seen arrived, then they moved to a corner table and talked for a while."

Another unknown man. "What did he look like?"

She shook her head. "I didn't see him. He wore a black cape, pulled down so his face was hidden."

He wrote that down. "Had you ever seen him here?"

Another gesture of negation. "No, never. He was the kind of man you'd notice. Tall, well dressed… not the usual pile of rubbish dressed in rags that frequents the Hairy Bear."

Suddenly, the elderly woman that had always treated him humanely didn't seem so nice anymore, considering she was speaking to a loyal customer. He decided to let it go.

"Anything else?"

"He didn't speak, kept to himself," she explained. "When Sarah saw him she took her bowl of soup, her ale and joined him at the table. They talked for a long while, but I couldn't hear them, and then they walked out, together. He paid for her dinner, left the coins on the table. That's it. Never saw her again. A week later she turned up dead in the sewers."

He added that to his notes, blew on the ink to dry it faster and closed the ledger then the inkwell. "Thank you ma'am, I really appreciate your help."

"Anytime Master Witcher. But if you return tonight, the waitress, Marguerite, might know more. I remember she was continuously serving a group of mercenaries close to their table, she might have heard something more."

"Thank you again, I'll take care to ask her about it."

He gathered his belongings in a leather pouch he tied to his belt and exited the inn. The courtyard where the entrance of the inn opened was damp and smelled of stale manure and urine, so he hurried away from it. Passing by the local brothel, he tried his luck even there and knocked. Carmen, the owner, opened it and smiled brightly when she saw him. After all, he had fixed many issues on her behalf, mostly taking care violent customers never returned to bother her girls. "Richard, it's so good to see you!"

"Likewise Carmen," he replied, jovial, as she led him in. The institution wasn't open yet and she was in the middle of the daily cleaning of the place. "I'm sorry to disturb you, but I took on a contract and I'm asking around. Do you or one of your girls know anything about the monster that killed that merchant last week?"

"Apart from the fact that business drops in the wake of each murder? Nothing, I'm sorry."

Not exactly the reply he wanted to hear, but he prodded her on.

"I've been told there's a weird man, always dressed in black with a heavy cowl over his eyes, that was seen with two of the victims. Appears to be a follower of the Church Of The Eternal Fire."

The redhead prostitute took the broom and went back to sweeping the floor. "That type of man never walks through the door. They see a whore and they curse her with their gibberish nonsense about purity and fire and what else. Sorry Rick, but I've never seen anyone that matches your description."

"I see… would you mind passing the word to the others?

"Of course, everything for our favourite monster slayer and occasional bouncer. You stay at the Hairy Bear?" He nodded. "I'll leave a message in case they remember something."

"Always the best, Carmen. Leave a message even if some customer gets a little too rough, alright?"

"Will do. Now go and catch the monster."

Once outside, he looked around and took a moment to think about what to do next. He had uncovered enough to go back to Beckett's place and report back. He still had to go asking questions around the rich quarters and other guards, but he had the whole afternoon for that.

As he walked back to the house, in the Trade quarter, he noticed a small group of men that barked curses and insults at someone. They had him flanked against the wall of the graveyard and they were continuously shoving him trying to make him fall on the muddy soil.

"Hey!" he called at them. "Stop hurting that man!"

The aggressors turned towards him and grunted. "The fuck do you want?"

"I told you, stop hurting that man!"

"And if we don't?" one of them sneered. "What d'yawanna do? Beat us? Four against one?"

Castle prepared to fight, quietly casting the protective shield around him. Just in case. "Been in worst situations. So? Are you going to stop or what?"

One of them lunged at him with a blackjack in hand. His movements were wide and slow and the Witcher had more than enough time to close in with him in order to avoid being hit and strike at the same time. With his left hand closed in a fist, he pushed his knuckles deep in the brute's elbow, so deep he pinched the man's nerve. The sudden shock forced him to drop the weapon, but most of all gave Castle enough time to punch the guy in the solar plexus. One single strike that sent him to the ground, breathless. Fast, precise, neat. Best result with the smallest effort.

"So?" asked the Witcher. "Anyone else?"

Apparently, no one wanted to fight. They left in a hurry, leaving their agonizing friend right there where he had fallen.

Castle looked at the guy they were threatening. "So? What have you done to piss them off?" he asked him. Because he knew that man very well, along with Geralt, he had saved his life multiple times.

"You know Richard… your brother usually beat the crap out of people," he groaned. "But I like your style more."

"Less blood to wash from my clothes. So? What brings you to Vizima, Dandelion?"

Dandelion, Geralt's best friend, world-renowned poet, travelling minstrel and Oxenfurt University lecturer, was known for the ease he threw himself in troubles. He was like a magnet for trouble and one of the reasons his brother often left a trail of dismembered limbs and broken bones.

"Money, of course. It makes the world go round, right?" he quipped, beating his clothes to clean them from the dust. "You? Annual meeting with Gina, I suppose. Did your last novel sell well?"

Castle shrugged. "Not bad, like the others. Sent in a new one too. You liked it?"

"Yeah, just as usual. You know I'm not too into that genre, but it was good. By the way, thank you for the help. Nice way to start the day."

"Dandelion, it's after noon."

The bard smirked. "Way too soon for my tastes, but I had a meeting with the chamberlain at court and…"

"You still haven't told me why those guys were showing not exactly kindness towards you."

"Oh yes, those… let's just say we played a little dice yesterday and I might have won most of their money and they wanted it back."

Castle, knowing perfectly well that the bard was an amazing creator of bullshit, crossed his arms and stared at him. He would go as low as using the Axii Sign to extort the truth from him, but he had other means.

"Oh all right, I stole the rest of the money they had when they passed out from too much drinking!"

The Witcher nodded. "Good to know. Now… I'm working on a contract, and I need to report back to the issuer. You're at the New Narakort?"

Dandelion nodded. "For now. I'm hoping the chamberlain will choose me for a month of parties Foltest is organizing for his daughter's birthday. That would mean I'd stay at court. You? Hairy Bear?"

"Just as usual. Come down with the plebs, have a beer or two."

"I'll see if I find the time. See you around Richard, it was good to see you."

Castle smiled. "I bet… See you, Dandelion, try not to get in trouble."

* * *

He found Kate in the living room, setting up a big corkboard against a window. "Hey, what are you doing?"

She jumped, definitely startled by his sudden appearance in her house. "Woah, sorry… Got me scared for a moment here. I'm setting up a murder board, since you retrieved Lanie's files and the alderman's book. It will help you visualize the pieces of evidence we gather."

"Uhm, never used one, though I've seen people using them for alchemical recipes. Nice idea though. By the way, I think I found a very interesting lead," he said, placing his ledger on the table, before her. "The last two victims have been seen leaving New Narakort Inn and the Hairy Bear Inn with a dark clad man wearing a heavy cowl on his head that made it impossible to recognize him. A beggar usually stationed outside the embassies says such a man is part of the Kaedweni envoy and a follower of the Eternal Fire."

"How did you even find this information?" she asked, flipping the pages of his ledger. "Nice handwriting!"

"Thanks, I need to make it readable for the publisher. Anyway, I just went out and asked things. Lanie gave me a couple of useful tips and I'm following them. I started with the beggars at the Temple, then moved to the Hairy Bear and talked to the innkeeper's wife," he explained. "Later I'll try at the New Narakort, since the last victim was renting a room there. And The Fox. I also asked Carmen to ask her girls if they knew anything."

She nodded. "Good idea, going to Carmen. I questioned her a couple of times on unrelated matters and every time she's always been extremely cooperative. Good businesswoman, that one!"

"Madames in brothels tend to be borderline geniuses when it comes to business," he replied, leaning against the table in front of the still empty murder board. "So? What do you want to do now?"

"I'm thinking about going down in the archive of the city guards and taking a good look at the Kaedweni embassy reports. Just to know who we're dealing with. The Kaedweni envoy isn't big, I might find a name quicker than you think."

"And if we can cross reference it with what I will find out. Also, the innkeeper's wife at the Hairy Bear told me to question their waitress tonight, she might know something more."

Beckett nodded, but remained silent for a moment. "Wow…" she then exclaimed. "In half a day you managed to uncover more than me in nearly ten years."

Castle shrugged. "You had a job and needed to keep a low profile. Also, I tend to think a little outside the box. You never thought of questioning the beggars, didn't you?"

"Nope. They are usually unreliable witnesses, so we tend to not question them. I'll change that from now on. How about we eat something then we go back to work?"

"Sounds great."

 


	8. Of Redheads And The Eternal Fire

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm back! Sorry it took me so long to update but first I had eight days of MetalDays, then my dad underwent knee surgery to fix his leg and now needs a chaffeur so I'm always driving him around here and there, also Alex was in the US on her amazing trip, things got in my way. Anyway, here it is!
> 
> Fans of Yennefer, please forgive me, but I seriously can't stand her. I'm TeamTriss, sorry.

**Chapter 8 - Of Redheads And The Eternal Fire**

They split again, right after they ate a quick lunch. They worked more than well together, but if they split up, they'd cover more ground. While Beckett stormed the City Guard archives and plunged into tomes and tomes of records, Castle stormed the rest of the inns and the marketplace. Apparently, many people around town had seen the man they were looking for, but no one knew where to find him, or who he was.

He wasn't a regular at the New Narakort, the posh inn of Vizima, but he had been seen there many times through the years, the innkeeper and the staff had a vivid memory of the black clad man, always wearing a cowl over his eyes, who spoke little and never ordered anything alcoholic. Apparently, the owner of the inn was rather pissed off with the person because when he came in he brought such a grim atmosphere that people stopped drinking altogether after a while and he lost money.

At the Queen Of The Night, the high-end brothel for rich folks, no one had ever dealt with said man, though the girls had seen him around, mostly during important city celebrations. One of the prostitutes told him she once tried to approach him, considering he looked extremely wealthy by the quality of his clothes and the jewelry and she wanted to earn some money on the side. She said he shoved her away and barked the worst insults at her, to the point the crowd around them had to stop him, dragging him away from the poor girl as he was getting violent.

Apparently, he took the teachings of the Church Of Eternal Fire very seriously, down to the last comma.

Just the right type of man Castle loved to deal with. Most of the world population didn't actually see Witchers with a nice, kind eye, but those who followed the Church tended to be even more radical in their delirious fanaticism and were often violent towards him.

Once, he and Geralt had a not so nice encounter with a gang of fanatical cultists one night in Tretegor, many years before. They were still young, with little experience and they still tended to celebrate by drinking themselves into a stupor after every successful contract in shady holes where scuffles were rather common. They were in the middle of their impromptu partying when a pack of those idiots barged in and demanded to be served earlier than yesterday.

They hadn't noticed the pair of white haired Witchers in the darkest corner of the tavern, but once they were drunk enough, one of the men noticed Geralt's cat-like glowing eyes as he paid for their drinks. After that, all hell broke loose in the tiny dirty joint. They started shouting at them, then when Richard came to help his older brother against the barrage of insults, fists started flying and blood spurts landed on the walls.

The long past memory his brain had conjured made him smile, as Castle wrote down the last things he had learned just outside the brothel, leaning on a wall so the inkwell wouldn't spill. He and Geralt might be quite different as men, both in character and appearance, but no matter what, they always had each other's back, most of all when they were younger.

When he was done, he realized it was getting dark. All the questioning had taken up all afternoon and the sun was quickly going down behind the houses. "Time to report back." However, he didn't have much to tell. Maybe Beckett had been more fortunate with the archives.

He found her just outside her house, carrying a wooden chest. "Hey, need some help?"

She nodded and handed the chest to him. It was actually quite big and heavy. "Thanks Castle."

"Hey, you know I have a first name?"

"Yeah…" she puffed, out of breath. "It's just… I picked up the habit at work, sorry."

"Not that I don't like it," he explained. "It just sounds weird. Everyone calls me Rick, they barely bother with my full name, let alone the surname," he mused.

"I don't even think I've ever been called my full name outside official gatherings. My mother used to call me Katherine only when I was in trouble."

Castle chuckled. "I can't really picture you in trouble. You seem like such a nice girl!"

"I've had my wild child phase. Ask Triss about it, next time you see her. Or Yennefer." She opened the door and let him in, but he could barely walk as he was trying to suppress a sudden burst of laughter that threatened to make him topple and let the chest fall from his hold. "What?" she asked when she heard him giggling.

"I don't even want to think about a wild child phase that involves those two. No, seriously no… I just can't."

She shook her head, slightly amused. "You've been around those two quite a lot, am I right?"

He set the chest down on the table, beside the alderman's tome and Lanie's folders. "It happens, when one of them is madly in love with your brother but he has eyes and ears only for the other."

She squinted her eyes as she looked at him. "Do I detect a little bitterness in your voice?"

Castle looked down. It wasn't only a  _little_ bitterness. It was a  _bucket_  of bitterness! "Kind of…" he downplayed it. "It's just… I spent the past twenty years or so trying to convince Geralt that Yennefer wasn't exactly the woman of his dreams, that she treated him like crap most of the time and meanwhile Triss… She genuinely loved him, and he only had eyes for Yennefer, a woman that used and abused him all the time for her own profits, often leaving him with nothing but a broken heart. Triss suffered a lot, watching him hurt so bad for a woman that gave him only a fraction of the affection he showed her and… well, I care a lot for her, she's my friend and I hated to see her suffer like that just because my own brother was stupid enough to unwittingly create a bond between himself and Yennefer by using the last wish of a djinn that meanwhile was tearing Rinde apart!"

Kate sighed. "I see your point. So, you don't think your brother's feelings for Yennefer were genuine?"

He shook his head. "Not a bit. I think the magical bond between them was tearing them apart, one piece at a time, and they were both too stubborn, or simply stupid to go look for a way to break the curse. Geralt would move mountains and dry up oceans for Yennefer, and he often did something very close to that, but her? What did she do for him for all those years they were together, on and off?"

"She helped him raise Cirilla. They did a damn fine job at that too."

He groaned, clearly angry about it. "I did most of the job. They all came to me, when they needed help. Yes, they were like a father and a mother to her, surely more than Emhyr and Pavetta ever were for obvious reasons…" Pavetta had died in a shipwreck when Ciri was nothing more than a toddler and Emhyr had the throne of Nilfgaard to reclaim, he didn't have time to be a father. "But they always came to me! Because I have a slightly older daughter and I knew what to do!"

Beckett's perfectly styled eyebrows shot up in surprise. "Excuse me? You have a daughter?"

He pulled a chair away from the table and sat down. "Yeah well… technically she's not mine. I adopted her… It's a long story; I don't want to bore you to death."

She sat in front of him. "We've been working all day long and I'm kind of tired, but it's still early for dinner. Just tell me that story, I'd like to know you better."

Castle took a deep breath. "Alright. You see… my mother was a minstrel when she was alive. A damn good one. One night, she stopped at an inn and offered her services as an entertainer in exchange for food and a place to sleep and the innkeeper gladly accepted. After all, there weren't many innkeepers brave enough to refuse a performance by the world renowned Martha Rogers in exchange for some food and clean bed, she didn't ask for much at the time. Only, the same night my father was staying at the same inn. He was a mercenary and a damn womanizer and well… she fell for his curtseys. After all, she was pretty young at her time, she had reached her fame quite early... She got pregnant with me, but had no means to care for me and when I was born, a druidess that was taking care of her told her that she could always give me up to the Witchers, like she had done just a couple of years before with her own son."

"Let me guess: the druidess was Geralt's mother."

He nodded. "Exactly. Visenna, contrary to my mom, rather forgot she had ever had a baby and Geralt grew up never hearing from her. My mother instead wrote me letters and I responded. We had a pretty tight correspondence and sometimes she dropped off at Kaer Morhen, bringing some jolly time in the otherwise grim place. Eskell once cried when he saw her approaching the fortress."

Beckett smiled. "Really? I can't imagine Eskell crying!"

Oh, so she knew him. He wondered how many other Witchers she was acquainted with. "Yes… we were… six or seven and we just had a fuckin' horrible day. Nothing was going right, we were training in mud and rain, it was cold… an utterly shitty day. She quietly made her way in the courtyard where we were training, covered head to boot in a thick cape to keep water and cold air away and waited until we stopped working before she let us know she was there. When Eskell saw her, he dropped his training sword and rushed to hug her, falling in a puddle of mud in the process."

"Must have been a relief, to see someone like her at the fortress."

"Yeah…" he replied, his voice filled with longing at the memories. "At the time Geralt and I didn't know we were stepbrothers and… he was a bit jealous of me. My mom was the only one that visited, the others… they knew the Trial Of The Grasses is often fatal, only four out of ten people make it, but my mother… she cared. And not only for me, for all of us. Even Vesemir liked her, she was the only outsider that was allowed inside, any time of the year. She came, taught us songs, told us stories… for a week or two she took away the boredom of studying all day and if it wasn't studying it was sword training… She was a bright light in a very dark sky. And Geralt, though with time he came to love her, was jealous."

"Did that hinder your relationship?"

Castle shrugged his shoulders. "We were nothing but tykes at the time. As we grew up, we grew closer and he forgot about the jealousy, he realized it was a bit stupid, everything considered."

"How did you and Geralt realize you were siblings?"

"When we were old enough to understand, Vesemir, our mentor, showed us a letter my mother and Visenna had wrote when I was sent to Kaer Morhen. They had exchanged some tales about the fathers of their babies and they quickly realized they were talking about the same ruggedly handsome mercenary that knew his way around women. That's it. However, deep down we already knew we were linked by something more than a childhood friendship and the comraderies that characterizes most of the Witchers of the same school. It was just the last piece of the puzzle."

"Alright, but after that? How did you end up adopting a child?"

"Well, fast forward many years, I underwent the Trial of the Grasses and passed it splendidly, along with Geralt. They did some more experiments on us and that resulted in the white hair, but we came out stronger than the average Witcher. It also partially gave me my blue eyes back." He pointed at the scythe shaped flash of blue in his irises, where Witchers usually had bright glowing yellow eyes. "Anyway, my mother grew old and couldn't travel anymore, so she settled in Oxenfurt and started teaching there. Ever heard of the bard Dandelion?"

Beckett smiled. "Who hasn't? He's here in Vizima, I saw him this morning."

"I know. I had to save him from a pack of brutes he has swindled last night. Anyway, my mother taught him pretty much all he knows about poetry and ballads. And in her class there was another girl, Meredith. She suffered the same fate as my mother and she basically took her under her wing as to protect her. Once I passed through Oxenfurt and went to see my mom and met Meredith. She had this beautiful baby girl, probably just days old, and I just… I fell in love. With both of them."

Again, his words tore a smile from the sorceress. "Never heard a Witcher speak the word  _love_  before."

Castle chuckled at the remark. "Yeah well… contrary to popular belief, we have feelings. We're capable of the whole spectrum of feelings, we're just… better at hiding them?"

"Then Geralt is a champion at hiding his feelings."

"You never saw him after Yen broke up with him. Or when he finds out children are being hurt, somewhere, somehow. In the first case, he cries like a child. On the other… ever seen a dragon?" She nodded. "Well, he gets just as destructive. Anyway... For the next ten years I basically lived in Oxenfurt, taking local contracts so I wouldn't have to stay away for too long while Meredith worked full time as a performer at the theater there. However, it didn't work. She wanted more. She started travelling with a moving theater company and was gone for most of the year, and I made a living by teaching swordfight and that's when I started writing."

"You started because you had nothing better to do?"

"I had to bring food home, I had a ten year old baby girl to feed. For a long while I solely provided for the family and when Alexis was old enough to live by herself, she practically pushed me to start being a Witcher again. She lived at the university and worked at the morgue so she could afford the dorm room, while my books and contracts along with some money from Meredith paid for university. Now she's a lawyer."

She smiled. "You must be proud of her."

"She's the best thing that ever happened in my life. I don't care if she's biologically not mine, I'm the one she calls daddy. It's more than enough."

"You sound like my father."

"How?" he asked.

"He's incredibly proud of me, of what I'm doing and the way I manage to keep everything under control. When they found out I had a knack for learning magic, they soon sent me to the school in Vengerberg. I learned pretty much everything I know there, and when my mother was killed I renounced a very remunerative place at the court of Kovir to solve her murder and help my father recover from alcoholism."

"Can I ask you something extremely rude?"

By the gleeful look in her eyes, he knew she had guessed what he was going to ask. "Like how old I am? I'm 45."

Oh. She was much younger than he thought. Then again though, sorceress altered their looks in order to always look young and beautiful, though he had the feeling she had only stopped the effect of time on her skin. Many sorceresses were sent to the school in Vengerberg because they were malformed or maimed girls that no one wanted to deal with, and they learned how to alter the way people saw them pretty early during their studies. Signs of the previous defects remained, minor things that a trained and observant eye would easily pick up, though. Kate Beckett had none of such defects. "I thought you were older. I was going to ask you how come your father was still alive."

"My parents married young; I was born when my mother was eighteen. They managed to finish law school and become successful lawyers. My father is now an elderly gentleman that lives in a nice apartment just down the road, but he has already passed his prime. I'd really like to solve this murder before he dies though, at least he'd leave this world knowing who killed his beloved wife and why."

Castle tapped his fingers on the table, absentmindedly. "You know that sometimes there's no motive?" he asked her. "Sometimes it's only the work of a deranged mind. There might be a story behind it, but it might make no sense for us."

She shook her head. "No, I've been working in the city guard long enough that even when a deranged mind kills there's always a reason. It might be stupid and trivial, but there's always something that makes it happen. Something that makes that mind click and that starts the need to kill. And I'm starting to think it's religion based."

He leaned forward, curious. "Why?"

"When you mentioned the man in black this morning, from Kaedwen… I suddenly realized that at least six of the victims had expressed some degree of criticism against the Church Of Eternal Fire."

"Did your mother…"

She nodded, vehemently. "My mother was an atheist, but being from Redania, she kept an eye what happened there. The Church Of Eternal Fire started there, then quickly expanded to most of the Northern Kingdoms, but she thought it was too strict a religion, that it smothered freethinking and was too intrusive of its followers' private life. And she was kind of vocal against it."

"The others?"

"One of the victims was a priestess of Melitele, she died shortly after the Order Of The Flaming Rose arrived. Then there was a druid from the Circle just outside of Vizima, in the Swamps. A city officer that basically thought the same as my mother and from what I learned on our last victim, our dear merchant was a vehement opposer of the Church back in Redania."

"That's no coincidence Beckett. I've been told that one of the girls from the Queen Of The Night has been harassed by this man one day as she tried to approach him. He said that she should burn at the stake for trying to corrupt a pious man like him, that she was the scum of society and the like."

"Don't followers of the Eternal Fire despise monsters though?" she asked.

"Usually, yes. But this man… he's probably trying not to get caught. What's the best way? Blame the monster, so the Witcher comes, kills the monster and he only needs to capture another one. Lesser monsters like Drowners, Fleders and Ekkimaras are easy to catch and keep alive with little food. Lesser vampires also hibernate when they don't receive enough nourishment and wake up and the slightest smell of blood, ready to eat their fill."

"Alright. Come on, Espo and Ryan should have already finished their shift, let's go down to the Hairy Bear for dinner."

He smiled. "I think it's a great idea. We'll start working again tomorrow, alright?"

"You will work tomorrow on this, at least until late afternoon. I have the day shift."

"Oh… alright. I'll go ask around the Church then. But let's go down to the inn. I'm starving and I think Dandelion will join us later."

"...And then there was this body, half decomposed, belly swollen with gas and this young intern, so sure of his degree with fresh ink still on the parchment, approaching with a sharp scalpel…" Lanie was telling a hell of a horrific story as they shared a drink later that night. Castle was prepared to laugh hysterically, he knew perfectly well where that story was going. "And I tell him; pay attention, that's not fat, it's gas! And he goes: you're a woman, you know nothing of human anatomy! Then starts the Y incision. As soon as he cuts into the belly, the gas explodes, sending tiny bits of guts everywhere in a radius of three meters, along with everything that man had eaten before he died. That guy never touched a corpse again."

Hilarity ensued, just as he expected. "Oh man…" said Castle, still laughing like a mad man. "Reminds me of the first time I faced a rotfiend…" he started. "I had been out of school for less than a year and I found this contract and well… you see, rotfiends explode when they're about to die. Pretty much like the corpse you spoke of, only they release acid along with what they just ate and their guts."

The medical examiner made a disgusted smirk. "A powerful acid?"

"Not much, but it landed square into my eyes. I had to blindly cut the head of the monster and then walk back to the village. Needless to say the money from the contract was spent at the inn because I couldn't travel if I couldn't see."

"You know…" a bright, loud and slightly slurred voice interrupted him. "Something similar happened to your brother!"

It was Dandelion. He had finally decided to appear at the Hairy Bear, already intoxicated. By the stupefied smile on his face he had gotten the contract and he was spending a little more than the usual on drinks, as he already had a pint of ale in one hand.

"Hey there, nice to see you down here with the plebs!" joked Castle as he slid a bit closer to Kate on the bench so he'd leave some space for the poet to sit. "Guys, this is Master Dandelion, world renowned poet and the scourge of every father of a virgin girl."

"What a way to introduce me to your new friends, Rick. Yet, you speak no lies. Nice to meet you gentlemen. And ladies." He threw a flirty smile to Kate and Lanie. Damn that bard was worse than Geralt with women.

"Nice to meet you too," replied Ryan. "What brings you here to Vizima?"

"Your king has called for a month of festivities for his daughter-bar-sister birthday. Doesn't that sound a bit fucked up?"

Lanie smirked. "Just a bit? Our gracious king raped and knocked up his own sister, and that poor creature turned into a striga… Not exactly the nicest situation, considering that girl is technically the heir to the throne of Temeria and you know how flighty that girl can be."

Castle nodded. "Who do you think designed the plan to end the curse of the striga?"

Beckett turned towards him. "You?"

"Hell yeah it was me. I told you, Geralt's good with what is out of the ordinary. Ending the curse of a striga? Way too normal, he didn't even remember what to do, I had to help him devise a plan, he was lucky I was in town."

"Did you have to help him often?" asked Esposito. The Witcher had come clean with them pretty early that night, he had willingly revealed he was Geralt's younger brother. They didn't know him, but he was pretty famous in Vizima because he had managed to lift the curse from Adda, Foltest's daughter and basically defy the rules of the world. Adda was conceived out of rape, incestuous rape, and was stillborn. It was a deadly combination that would surely turn the poor creature into a monster, be it a botchling or a striga, as it had happened, or something worse. He wasn't even sure how the hell that girl could still be alive.

Castle shrugged his shoulders. "Not that often, not to that extent I mean. He often asked for some advice when we were travelling together, but it was mutual. I'm an expert on curses and the ordinary, I often asked for his help when I found something that I didn't know as well as he did. We helped each other a lot, when he was alive."

"You two were the scourge of monsters, when you worked together," added Dandelion. "If only Zoltan was here…"

"Zoltan?" asked Ryan.

"Zoltan Chivay, one of the toughest whoresons I've ever met," replied the poet. "Last time I saw him was when Geralt died. How long ago?"

"Five years ago," answered Castle, hiding the bitter tone of his voice in the tankard. "The pogroms in Rivia."

"Yeah… I remember. Oh well… Anyway, how's your contract going?"

Castle threw a quick glance at Beckett, and she gave him a barely perceivable nod. "Not bad. I've got a lead I'll look into tomorrow morning. I was too hungry to do it tonight."

In that moment, the door of the inn burst and a group of men, clad in red and black gambesons, heavily armed and by the look of their faces, not entirely happy. Soldiers of the Order Of The Flaming Rose, given the elaborated embroidery on the front of their uniform.

The bustle inside the crowded inn suddenly stopped as every customer turned to look at the newcomers with fear and deference. The group was composed of six men and they didn't look happy. As if they knew where to look, they circled a table where three elves were cowering over their tankards trying to hide. To Castle, their intention waspretty clear. Those whoresons followers of the Church Of Eternal Fire were looking for a fight and they had already picked their victims. Outnumbered and unarmed, the elves tried not to attract their attention, but they were failing completely. The thugs, because there was no other word to describe them, as they were not soldiers, had already decided they were going to hurt them. Or worse.

The Witcher growled, the low rumble reverberated in his chest and against the table he was leaning on. He felt someone touching his shoulder and turned to find Kate grasping his shirt as if to stop him from doing something, shaking her head. He looked up and found his right hand already wrapped around the hilt of his steel sword. "Don't…" she whispered. "It's no use."

"But… you're city guards!" he exclaimed, appalled by their lack of action. "You should protect your citizens!"

"Yes, we should," replied Esposito. "But those idiots of the Order surpass our authority. Two months ago our Captain was killed because he had tried to stop one of the Order from killing a young she-elf that had done nothing but spill some water on the gravel in front of the Eternal Fire temple. And it was useless because the soldier killed the girl all the same."

The guard's words did nothing but make Castle more furious than he already was. "Damn…" he growled. He looked at the group of harmed soldier and saw that they were already harassing the poor elves. "Are they really so powerful that they can murder the captain of the guard and not be punished for it?"

Lanie nodded. "They took over pretty much everything that's not petty theft, drunken brawls outside inns and unregulated prostitution. High profile crimes are under their jurisdiction."

That confused and angered Castle even more. "But those murders? You're still investigating on them, right?"

Ryan shrugged. "They're not considered high profile crimes. Witchcraft and anything related to magic is considered high profile, same goes for the regulation of the non-human population. That's what they do. And it's not like we're overcome with crimes, Vizima is pretty calm, everything considered."

Grunting, Castle moved his fingers beneath the table and cast a protective shield on the three elves. Just in case. It was invisible, so the soldiers couldn't see it, it would protect the small group, as long as they didn't separate, for two, maybe three blows, more than enough time for him to rush at their side and protect them.

"I hate the Eternal Fire…" he stated then, before taking a long swig of his ale.

"Me too," added Beckett. "You see now why I don't boast about being a sorceress?"

Eyebrow arched in a questioning look, Castle pointed at her colleagues and the medical examiner. "And they know?"

The trio nodded. "We're her friends, of course we know!" replied Lanie.

There was a loud bang in the otherwise pretty silent inn. Castle looked to his left and saw one of the soldiers stunned, looking at his sword now stuck in the ceiling. He chuckled.

"What have you done?" whispered Beckett.

"Quen can be cast on a third party, not only on the caster. I was almost sure they'd attack the elves, I protected them."

"What kind of sorcery is this?" screamed the raging soldier. He grabbed the hem of the tunic of one of the elves and pulled him to his feet. "What have you done? Are you one of those filthy magicians?"

The elf, scared to the point he was shivering, shook his head. "No sir…" he pleaded. "I'm not a magician, I'm just a dock worker!"

"A dock worker uh? Show me your work permit then!"

"I…" the elf cried as the soldier pinched his skin as he tightened the grip on his tunic. "I don't have it here… I'm off duty, I left it at home!"

"Uh, so you're out of your slum with no means to identify you?" The elf nodded. "And you performed some kind of magic trick too! You know that I have all the rights to kill you, here and now?"

The soldier reached at his belt and pulled a knife from a hidden sheath and raised the steel blade above the elf's head, intended to strike between his neck and clavicle apparently.

Out of nowhere though, a second throwing knife embedded itself in the back of the soldier's hand, forcing him to drop the knife and let the elf go, screaming bloody murder and holding his now pierced hand. One of his companions, overcoming the state of astonishment that had glued them to the floor, walked towards the wounded man and pulled the knife away.

Castle heard Lanie take a soft but audible intake of air. "Wrong idea."

The Witcher briefly smiled, readying a second knife in case of necessity.

"Who did that?" asked the second soldier, brandishing the throwing knife as if it was a burning torch. "Who's the whoresons that dared to throw this knife?" His voice echoed like a thunder in the crowded space.

At the question, Castle stood up and crossed his arms at his chest, to hide the second throwing knife. "It was me. But my mother wasn't a whore."

The man swallowed hard, visibly shocked by finding a Witcher in his path. "How dare you? Do you even know who we are?"

"Racist pricks with no taste for clothes?"

The unexpected joke made the crowd around them burst in a hysterical laugh, while the soldiers suddenly became all red with rage. "How dare you?" repeated a third soldier of the Order, with a slightly nasal and high-pitched voice.

"Well…" started Castle. "I've been here for a couple of hours and the only thing those elves did was drink their beers and mind their own business. So? Why do you harass them?"

"They are elves, they never mind their own business. Maybe they'd been talking about organizing a raid with the Scoia'tel!"

The elves looked up at the soldiers, shaking their heads vehemently, then they looked at the Witcher, their eyes pleading for help. "You want to know what they talked about? The one with short hair… his wife is having a baby! That's why they're here! To celebrate!" With his fine hearing, Castle had heard parts of their conversation and they had talked about babies and pregnancy since they had set foot in there.

"Could be a code for an incoming shipment of weapons," declared the wounded soldier.

"Oh come on, how could you be so freaking obtuse!" snapped Castle.

"Now listen you mutant freak, you have no jurisdiction here, you can't do anything!" shouted again the wounded soldier. "Go in the swamps and kill stinkin' drowners or whatever monster you like!"

Castle chuckled. "Yes, I could go back to swamps and kill drowners, but then they'd have to cut your fuckin' wage because they'd have to pay me! And by the way, yes, I could go back to kill monsters too, but then I'd have to kill all of you, because the only monsters I see in here are you..."

The last sentence, spoken in a voice that was more a growl than a voice, clearly scared the soldiers. He might have been outnumbered, but Witchers were master swordsmen, better trained than a group of raging paranoids that blindly followed a sectarian and racist religion, they knew they'd lose the fight, and probably end up crippled, or dead.

But they weren't smart. The healthy soldiers pulled their swords out of their scabbard. "You want to kill us?" one of them taunted him. "Come and get us."

"Castle don't…" snapped Beckett behind him.

"Don't worry, I'm not even pulling out the sword until they come here," he whispered to her and the other off duty guards behind him.

"You chicken, Witcher?"

Then, Castle waved his fingers and the trousers of one of the soldiers caught fire, right on his butt. He screamed, panicking as he tried to extinguish the fire on the magically ignited canvass, and needless to say, all hell broke loose in the small inn.

 


	9. Chapter 9

**Chapter 9 - Fists Of Fury**

The formerly filthy but otherwise tidy inn was now an open ring. Tankards got smashed over heads, plates were thrown and crashed on the walls, sometimes still with half eaten portions of stewed beef on them, cutlery was used as improvised weapons.

And in the middle of that, five heavily armed soldiers fought against a single brave fighter, who purposely fought with only his bare hands against those who only sought to bring discord to the world.

Castle was pretty sure Dandelion was already composing a ballad about that situation. With better words of course, he knew his own abilities at poetry sucked hard compared to the master bard, but he was sure he was already composing in his mind, as he comfortably rested in one of the inn protected by Beckett, Ryan and Esposito. As guards, even in off duty, they were obliged to protect those who weren't participating the inn-wide brawl, and in that moment, only Dandelion wasn't fighting. So they stood there, guarding him, pushing back any assailant.

As he fought.

Not a tough fight, he had to say. Those  _soldiers_  were poorly trained and brandished their swords the same way a child uses a stick to play with other children. He quickly disposed of two of them, by simply applying the first hand-to-hand combat technique he had been taught back at Kaer Morhen: kick to the shins, fist to the nose and one quick push to the shoulders so they fell with their back against a chair, stunned and unable to get up for at least then minutes.

More than enough to finish the rest off.

The three remaining men were more dangerous and he paid more attention to them. He even considered the idea of unsheathing his own sword for the occasion, but that would be considered a crime. He had no intention to spend the night in a dank cell just because three idiots were stupid enough to try and kill a Witcher.

"You're going to pay, freak!" yelled the one he had hit with the throwing knife, as he held his bleeding hand. "Tonight you'll die, and the world will be cleansed when we'll burn your corpse!"

"The only cleansing you'll be doing will be mopping up the floor of the inn when I'm done with you," snapped Castle in reply.

"We'll see about that!"

One of them charged. He held his sword high, more like an ax than a sword. That gave Castle all the time to dodge, stepping aside, and grab the assailant by the armed hand. Twisting it, he forced the man to drop the weapon, but Castle didn't stop. He kept turning his arm to an unnatural angle and the man followed so the arm wouldn't break, into what turned out to be a devastating flip that landed him heavily on one of the tables. The considerable weight broke the wooden piece of furniture, and the heavy fall stunned the soldier to the point they couldn't stand for a long while.

But as he dealt with him, the other two flanked him and grabbed each an arm, effectively trapping him. "Fuck…" he cursed as one of them grabbed him by the hair and forced his head back and exposed his neck to a knife.

The wounded one, evidently the boss in the small group, was holding that knife. Smiling.

"Well well… what do you want to do now?" The thick Temerian accent made Castle sick, he hated the way they drawled the words when speaking. "What's going on in your mutant head?"

"What's going on in my head?" he repeated, spiteful. "I'll show you what's going on in my head…"

Using his assailants as leverage, he drew his knees to his chest then kicked the man with the knife with both legs, then used the momentum to continue the circular motion and flip backwards. That also allowed him to twist himself out of his captor's hold.

That left them all unsure of what to do while he knew perfectly well what he was going to do. He grabbed the heads of those that had trapped him and pushed so hard and fast that they crashed against each other forehead. Beneath the noises around them, he heard perfectly well the sickening sound of their skulls cracking beneath the crushing pressure of the impact.

They fell on the floor, unconscious.

That left only the boss, who was now trying to recover from a kick hard enough that it had probably broke his sternum. Like the worm he was, he crawled away from the Witcher, scared to death as he walked closer, hands closed tight in fists of steel.

"Now you saw what I had in my mind, but now I want to know what's lurking in yours."

The Temerian soldier spit at him, a thick phlegmatic spit with traces of blood and soot, staining his dusty white shirt. "I won't speak to you, mutant!" Then he spit again, causing another stain.

"You know," sighed Castle. "This shirt was kindly lent to him by a very nice woman that saved my life just this morning. And you you've stained it. I've killed for less, you know that?"

"Then kill me, freak. I'll die a martyr for a new, cleansed world!"

Shaking his head, Castle simply kicked him right in the groin. He chuckled, as the man at his feet howled in pain. One testicle had surely burst, the other would be badly bruised by morning. Not to mention his cock. He would probably never have a decent hard on in his life, let alone sire children.

"You won't die, not today at least. But your line ends with you."

The brawl around him was still raging in full force. A glass bottle was thrown at him, and he caught it mid-air just an inch from his left ear. He saw a chair flying, a couple more tankards followed it. A thug, fuelled by alcohol and adrenaline, launched against him with a hunting knife, not unlike the one that hung from Castle's belt. The Witcher expertly dodged him but the large man was faster than he had predicted and couldn't avoid the sudden slash of the knife. He felt the blade sting as it cut through the now completely ruined shirt and the skin of right side.

"Damn, another ruined shirt!" he cursed as he threw a devastating hook to the man's temple, leaving him instantly unconscious on the ground, grunting in pain.

Still not willing to draw his sword but in desperate need to stop the massacre of pottery and skulls that was taking place in front of him, because  _of_  him, he made his way towards the middle of the inn, where a large mass of tangled, fighting limbs was occupying the space where once the dice tournaments were held. He threw himself in, with more strength that necessary, and started pulling the fighters away, one by one. One fierce look from his glowing, brazing stare in their eyes and they cowered, most of them rushed out of the inn to safety, away from the freak.

In the midst of it, Castle couldn't help but overhear a quite amusing conversation between Esposito, Beckett and Dandelion.

"Shouldn't we help him or something?" asked the dark skinned man.

"What for? He's in his element!" quipped the poet, evidently amused by the show in front of him. "And I wouldn't miss witnessing the White Dragon in a fistfight for nothing in the world."

"The White Dragon? The one from your ballads?" it was Beckett's turn to be surprised. "You mean the White Dragon is Castle?"

"Of course it's him! The Dragon And The Wolf was written about them, Richard Castle and Geralt Of Rivia, the most amazing team of Witchers that ever walked the continent!" he explained. "Who did you think he were?"

Beckett's reply was lost when a woman shrieked, loud enough that the whole raging scuffle come to a sudden halt. It was the innkeeper's wife, she had screamed when his husband had been pulled out of the commotion with the hilt of a dagger sticking from his thigh. He had hopped behind the counter and was now holding what looked like a rudimental exploding device, a lit torch in his other hand.

He was ready to risk and set the whole place on fire to stop the fight.

"Get the fuck out and take your wounded with you," he shouted. "Or I'll have y'all skinned alive after I blow your cocks up!"

The threat was more than enough. The pile of men dissolved quickly and almost everyone grabbed someone that wasn't able to walk and dragged them out, while Castle and some others remained. Either they weren't much scared by the crude bomb in the innkeeper's hand, or like Castle they knew that kind of bomb could barely make a loud pop, let alone cause an explosion. It  _could_  set dry wood, paper and other flammable things on fire though, and that was definitely a possibility, given the amount of vodka and spirits that had been poured over the floor and the furniture.

"And you…" The innkeeper's voice felt like steel grating against stone, so angry he was, as he spoke to Castle. "You, freak… leave. Now, before I flay you. And if you dare to come back, I'm going to kill you myself!"

Castle looked at the overweight man, not intentioned to show any sign of cowardice in front of the vile man that, year after year, had treated him like he was a flea-ridden, rabid mutt. He wiped the mix of dirt, sweat and blood from his face with the back of his hand and nodded, before walking upstairs to fetch his things. On his way up, he took a bottle of Mahakam spirit from behind the counter, pulled the cork out with his teeth and never breaking eye contact with the innkeeper, drank a long swig from it. "With pleasure, sir."

The silence around them as he left the main room was deafening.

Once upstairs, he shut the door of his room and cursed loudly in elvish as he tore the ruined, borrowed shirt off his body and looked down at the wound on his side. It wasn't deep, certainly not as deep as a monster's bite, but it was large and blood was oozing freely from it, seeping into the cloth of his black pants and staining the leather of his belt. He quickly took both the harness that held his swords on his back and the belt off, before pushing the hem of his pants down to see if the knife had cut into them too. Luckily, only the shirt had been ruined. He used it, now reduced to a bloody scrap of cloth, to pad the wound as he looked through his satchels for something to stop the bleeding.

He lay some clean gauze, a vial of disinfectant solution and adhesive bandage so he could fix the wound.

He bit his tongue not to moan in pain when he washed away most of the blood with the strong alcoholic spirit, just as the door of the room he would soon vacate opened. He looked up. "Beckett what are you doing here?"

The sorceress rolled her eyes. "Helping you, of course." She extended her hand towards the bottle of spirit, and he passed it over. "You weren't thinking of medicating it yourself, were you?"

He shrugged his shoulders. "That's what I usually do."

Beckett groaned. "Yeah well, the scars on your body clearly show it. Let me have a look." She moved his hand so it wouldn't press on the gash. When she saw the laceration, she nodded. "You need stitches."

"I don't need stitches, I just need some celandine and white parsley brew, and some sleep."

"You need all of them, idiot. You have the brew?" she asked. He nodded towards the bed. "Good. Sewing kit?" Defeated, Castle nodded again, and gestured to look in his backpack. She found the small pouch almost instantly, pulled out needle and thread. She imbibed them in the disinfectant and then started sewing the wound.

"Couldn't you just whisper some enchanted formula and heal it?" asked Castle at some point, evidently uncomfortable.

Beckett shook her head as she dabbed more antiseptic on the wound. "You know perfectly well it doesn't work that way. As much as I am a skilled healer, I can't just snap my finger and close the wound, magically. You know that."

The Witcher sighed, barely holding back a startled jump when the needle passed again through the strips of skin at the edge of the wound as she applied another stitch. "Yeah, I know…" he murmured, defeated.

"You could always take one of your potions, you know, if you have one at hand."

"Nah, thank you. As useful as they are, I prefer stitching to drinking any of them. First they taste awful, second they're toxic."

"I'm aware of that. It's the price of magic, Castle."

He shrugged. "Whatever."

She kept working in silence for a while, sewing more stitches into his skin. She was doing pretty neat work, from what he could see. Once healed, it would barely leave a scar, he was sure of that.

Then she spoke. "Where are you going to stay tonight?" she asked, cutting another piece of thread.

"Don't know. I'll find a place," he explained. "Vizima's is full of dark corners where one can sleep in peace."

The sorceress looked up, an appalled look distorting her beautiful face. "No way I'll let you sleep outside with an open wound!" she nearly screamed.

"You're closing it. It won't be open anymore by the time I find a place to stay. The tomorrow I'll see if the New Narakort has a room, or The Fox. I'll find a place to stay." He sighed. "I always do."

"You can always stay at my place," she proposed.

He shook his head. "No Beckett, you're already doing too much. First the change of clothes that I ruined by getting myself in a fistfight, then this… I can't accept it."

"For all that I care for those clothes… they were my ex's, I don't even know why I kept them."

Oh.

She had given him her ex's clothes.

"Maybe you wanted to get rid of them."

"Nah, I simply thought that sometimes having a change of clothes for a man can't hurt. Thing is, William wasn't even nearly as tall as you are, the pants must be a tad too short and I don't think you find them very comfortable."

"They're a little tight, in places," he explained, not revealing that he found the trousers extremely uncomfortable to wear, most of all around the crotch, out of courtesy. "And yes, they're short, but the boots hide that piece of calves the pants can't cover. I'm fine with that."

She sighed. "Anyway, they're ruined. But I'm serious about letting you stay at my place. The couch in my study is comfortable enough."

"I don't want to impose."

"Castle, you're helping me solving my mother's murder and in a day you did more than I could in ten years. You're not imposing. And before you complain about the fact that I'm paying you, believe me, I can afford your fee and I can afford to let you sleep on the couch."

She was determined to let him sleep at her house, apparently. He sighed and slouched his shoulders, defeated. "Alright, but only until I find another place."

"Deal. And by the way, thank you for standing up for those elves."

He chuckled. "It was nothing, really. I do that often enough."

"Yeah, but I know your brother died in front of you doing the same. One would think you'd stop doing it, considering it only got Geralt a pitchfork in the gut."

That tore a half smile from him. "And it got me this." He pointed at a large jagged scar on his back, not far from where he had been wounded minutes before. "Battleaxe. Nearly tore my liver off."

"You healed pretty well, scar excluded."

"Triss managed to stop the bleeding right away, kept the wound in a sort of stasis that allowed Dandelion and Zoltan to drag me away from the mob that was lynching non-humans, after they had killed Geralt and Yennefer. As they pulled me away, I saw Triss conjuring a huge hailstorm to disperse the crowd, then… black. For eight days, I was unconscious. And when I woke up, they didn't think I was strong enough to handle Geralt's death and the disappearance of his body. They told me only a month later, that the body was nowhere to be found."

"Must have been a hell of a hard time."

"Yeah, it was. But hey, the show must go on, right? In the end, no Witcher dies in his bed, unless someone kills him there so… he died doing something he believed in after all."

She nodded, pulled the thread and cut it close to the knot of the stitch. "Almost done here." She washed the wound with some more liquor and applied one of the adhesive gauzes he had. "Hey, what do you use for the glue?"

"Pine resin mixed with honey. Then I used waxed paper to keep the glue on the gauze and use it when needed."

"Uh, nice idea." She pressed on the adhesive part to make it stick to his now clean skin. "There you go, I'll take the stitches out in a couple of days, it should be enough for you to heal. I mean, you're a Witcher, you heal faster that a normal human being."

"Perks of being a mutant. Now, let me grab my stuff. I don't want to stay in this flea-ridden hole one moment more."

Hurriedly, he pushed all his belongings in the backpack, buckled his belt and harness back on and after making sure he had taken everything, they walked downstairs. Esposito, Ryan and Lanie were helping the wounded, while Dandelion tried to haggle with the innkeeper to allow Castle to return, if he paid for the damages.

He noticed that the inn lay in a worse state than he had imagined. Most of the tables and the chairs were broken, there were shards of shattered glass and pottery everywhere, stains of blood and signs of burning on the walls. Part of the soiled tapestry that hanged from the walls were torn or cut or damaged in some other way. It hadn't been a normal tavern brawl, it had been a massacre.

And it was his fault.

"It's not worth it Julian," said the Witcher as he pulled his money pouch from his belt. He dug out some coins, a considerable sum, and placed them on the counter. "Here, for the damages and the clean up. Keep the deposit for the room. Goodbye."

He walked out of the inn, closely followed by the bard, the sorceress and the rest of the small gang. "You know I hate it when you call me Julian?" asked Dandelion.

It was his real name. Dandelion was only a nom de plume, a pseudonym that helped him stay away from his noble origins so he would not be regarded as the usual rich spoiled brat that could afford to live off his father's money while he pursued a career of debauchery on the road to perdition, masked as a bard. He hated when Castle called him by his first name.

"All too well. That's why I call you like that, from time to time. Now… go back to your room and sleep tight. I assume you have a new ballad to compose, I wouldn't want you to lose your beauty sleep on my account."

The bard smiled, smug. "You can bet I have a new ballad to compose. It will be my showpiece for Foltest's court! So, Richard, where to you plan to stay?"

"Kate here offered her couch. It's more than enough for me."

Dandelion raised an eyebrow, inquisitive. "Oh, so now the damsel is offering her couch… I see something coming on that way…" he told him, quite allusive.

"Stop right there, there's nothing coming on from any way. She's just kind enough to help a Witcher in distress, that's all. And she's not a damsel, she's a tough one."

The poet shrugged his shoulders. "If you say so… but let me tell you, she's a fierce one. The way she handled that sword, trying to protect me? Exceptional. She might be worth trying to seduce just to see if she's just as fierce in bed."

Castle was about to punch him just to make him shut up. He hoped that Kate hadn't heard the ramblings of the intoxicated womanizer because otherwise he'd seriously punch Dandelion.

"Shut the fuck up, alright? I'm sorry I called you Julian, now would you please stop being so ploughin' embarrassing all the ploughin' time?"

Dandelion raised his hands and took a step back. "Alright alright, I give up. Now, please, would you at least do something to make her know you're actually attracted to her? Because, really… she's attracted to you."

"You poets and bards, always seeing romance when there's nothing…" murmured Castle. "Go back at the Narakort. I'll see you around."

Beckett then said goodbye to Esposito, Ryan and Lanie, before walking up to the pair. "You ready to go?"

Castle nodded. "Yes. I was just wishing Dandelion sweet dreams for tonight."

They walked, silently, to her place. As they moved through the mostly silent streets, Castle noticed some tension in her shoulders and neck. Her heartbeat was slightly accelerated and her steps were heavier, she was almost stomping as she walked on the gravel-covered roads. And in the dimly lit night, he could clearly see deep creases in her forehead.

"You alright?" he asked.

She shrugged. "Sure, why do you ask?"

"You're tense," he stated. "And before you try to tell me I'm wrong, don't even try it. I can see it written on your face and on the way you're hunching your shoulders. What's up?"

Beckett took a deep breath. "I don't know. I just feel like this is getting out of hand," she revealed, her voice carrying a tone of defeat he didn't like too much.

"If you mean I need to stop putting up fights I can…"

She shook her head. "No, it wasn't the bar fight, it's just… I've been trying to catch my mom's killer for ten years, I nearly gave up my training to find that bastard with no leads and then you come into the picture and suddenly you find lead after lead. In less than twelve hours. It's a lot to take in, that's all."

Gently touching her elbow, Castle made her stop in her tracks. "If there's something I can do to help…"

"Just help me kill that bastard. Too much blood has been spilled already, we don't need more victims."

He nodded. "That I can do, but that may take some time. Is there something I can do right now, to make you feel better? I'm a good listener, you know?"

Beckett sniffled. He didn't expect that. "Yes, I know. Triss told me she abused your ears for years."

That tore a smile from him. "I wouldn't say she abused of my ears, but she definitely abused my patience. But down to the point, I'm serious. Is there anything I can do to make you feel better?"

Without a word, she took a step towards him, circled his waist with her arms and hugged him tight. She lay her head on his chest, sighing, then repeated that sniffling. A bit dumbstruck, Castle needed a moment to process what was happening, but he wrapped his arms around her lithe frame and held her tight.

"Just…" she started, her words uncertain. "Just share a last drink with me, at my place. Keep me company for a while, before you go to sleep."

"Gladly. Come on, I saw a nice bottle of vintage wyvern blood vodka in your living room this morning, still unopened. Why don't we finally uncork it and see if it's as bad as everyone says?"

An hour later, the bottle of vodka was nearly empty and the Witcher and sorceress were amicably chitchatting, comfortably sitting at the table in her living room.

"So? What did you do?" asked Beckett when Castle stopped his tale of that time, roughly ten years before, when he was chasing a fleeing wraith that haunted a house and had unwillingly stepped in the territory of a draconid. And draconids, no matter what species, were extremely territorial.

"What could I do? I had just taken a dip in a cockatrice's pile of vomit and she was now in my trail, I let the wraith go and fought that," he explained. "Even though I was so covered in slime that the sword slipped from my grip and basically I had to break its neck with my bare hands!"

"Slippery?" she asked.

"Are you fuckin' kidding me? It was more slippery than catching a mud eel with your eyes closed!" He snatched the bottle and poured some more vodka in his shot glass. The he noticed the bottle was almost empty. "Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to finish the whole bottle."

Beckett shook her head. "No problem. I just need to teleport to the Druid Circle down in the swamp and buy another bottle."

"It's expensive."

The sorceress poured some in her own glass. "I can afford it."

"Now that you mention it… how can a city guard afford a house like this? I mean, this is no ordinary furniture, this is custom made. From what I know, city guards are under equipped and underpaid."

She smiled. "Well, I'm a sorceress after all. Finding other sources of income isn't hard."

"What sources?"

"You're being a lot more inquisitive than I thought."

Castle shrugged his shoulders. "I like to know who I'm working for."

"Well, I'm a skilled healer. There are people in Vizima that know who I am, and some of them pay me good money to help them with various ailments and… well, other things."

Ah well, he should have expected it. Skilled healers, no matter how young or dabbling in magic, were often sought for very specific problems. Every healer he had known in his life had been, at least occasionally, sought to get rid of… problems. Only sometimes those problems became bigger issues that required the involvement of a Witcher. The neverending cycle of life and death, after all.

"I see." He didn't say anything else.

"You know, you're the first one I told about this side activity that hasn't started an infinite tirade about the sanctity of life."

He snorted, trying to suppress a laugh. "You're talking to a person that for the past sixty years has made a living on shedding gallons of blood. I'm not pious enough to judge your line of work."

"Go and tell that to the other… anyway, I'm sorry for earlier.

"For what? You patched me up in a way that probably won't leave a scar, what should you be sorry for?"

"For what we talked about. I shouldn't have brought up Geralt's death."

His shoulders slumped a bit. "Oh… that. Don't worry about it. I took it pretty bad at the time but I got over it. As I said, no Witcher ever died in his bed."

"I understand but it was insensitive on my part. Come now, it's getting late and I have to be at work at eight AM tomorrow. Are you alright with sleeping on the couch?"

He threw a look at the luxurious piece of furniture, covered in red velvet, wide enough to accommodate his broad form and most of all, long enough. His towering stature sometimes forced him to sleep all curled up in uncomfortable positions because beds and bunks were too short for him. Not that one.

"I think I can manage. I have a blanket in my backpack, I will be fine."

"Good. In case you're cold, there are more blankets in the wardrobe downstairs, in the cellar. If you need anything, help yourself. There's food and water and anything you will need." She stood up. "Goodnight, Castle. See you tomorrow." With that, she stood and headed upstairs, to her bedroom.

He nodded. "Goodnight. And thanks again for the hospitality."

With one foot already on the first step, she stopped and smiled. "Don't mention it."


End file.
